I too love using old hardware for “real work”. My current writing workflow is Office 97 on Windows 95 (Pentium II) -> SMB share on a Raspberry Pi -> upload .doc to google drive from my iMac. It’s pretty nice for distraction-free typing, and I still find Word 97 easier to use than any modern word processor. And the appeal of playing with my old computer makes me more likely to want to write. :-)
The Win 95 machine is on a private network for which the Pi is the router, so the SMB share is available without connecting win 95 to the internet.
I recently dusted off my mid-90s CRT and with a HDMI/VGA adapter have been using it on my main system. Call it nostalgia, refresh rate, phosphor hypnosis, whatever, but it feels simpler and quieter and less intimidating than a 32" 4K.
Maybe the glass curve conveys a sense of the system being enclosed, as opposed to all around us as today.
Unlike most people, I found CRT more pleasing to use than LCDs. When LCDs started to become mainstream, they were making me dizzy after short use. After using the same screen for a longer period of time, I can somewhat get used to it, but I still feel queasy after more than few hours of use. But switching to another LCD still takes me some time to adjust to make it even usable.
Lots of people find CRTs more pleasing to use than LCDs, because of better contrast ratios and lower latencies. But--fascinating--I've not heard of LCDs making people dizzy, do you have any idea what it is about the LCD that makes you dizzy?
LCDs are actually infamous for making people dizzy, with the whole PWM thing. That's why many screens are advertised as "flicker-free". I am not an expert on the technical side of things but google "LCD displays PWM dizzy" and you'll get plenty of links. Commonly PWM is used for brightness management, so the screen might be flicker-free at high brightness (the blinding one like they use in computer stores), and suddenly it starts to flicker when you turn it down.
Why limit yourself to old hardware too. I was just thinking about how blazing fast Win 3.1 would run on a modern i9 machine. None of that pesky memory protection or preemptive scheduling getting in the way of getting real work done :-)
Old software can be too old for your new hardware. Windows 95 won’t boot on machines faster than 2.1 GHz without an unofficial patch [0]. Old Windows versions support only one CPU core, in 32-bit mode, without using many “fast” instructions. And on the RAM front, Windows 9x tends to get unstable if you have too much of it (512 MB is typically considered the limit).
I'd managed to get Windows 1.01 to boot on my (at the time brand-new) 2009 3GHz quad-core AMD64 CPU with I think 8GB of RAM. I don't remember which DOS version I was running it on. I'm not sure I knew how much RAM it saw. And it was surely only using 1 core, of course in 16bit mode.
I love Wine, and use it regularly for other progs like Netscape, but W97 works better this way. Even emulated, it is more responsive and cleaner than GDocs and LibreO
I had a pretty good time running an 8Gb rpi 4 running BSD with the Lumina D.E. I did the same experiment on a rpi 3 and found 1GB just a little too limiting for the type of work I was doing. 8Gb was definitely overkill for my workflow but I couldn't help myself when I was upgrading.
I think some of the productivity gains definitely felt like a placebo though. Having a device that just had the github repo of the project I was working on, with a fresh OS install with no other distracting things installed, is not a unique experience to the rpi. In fact I could mimic this by just creating a "work" user on my current desktop.
That’s a really nice idea. Maybe I could do the same with Dropbox. A good project for the Easter weekend - thank you!
I haven’t tried abiword as I didn’t use it “back in the day”, but I might give it a go. I’m also using AppleWorks on my iMac G3 with an identical setup. The G3 is nice because it’s fanless and therefore almost silent, though it has a bit of CRT whine nowadays.
Give abiword a try! It tried to clone office 97 as much as possible regarding user interface. Would get you off the windows 95 requirement and you could use Debian 32 bit.
Debian would also work nicely on that g3. Bring both of them up to date!
Rclone supports drop box. It’s more of a 15 minute rtfm task than an Easter weekend. If you are celebrating have a nice Easter.
Debian doesn’t work any more on PPC Macs, nor does any other Linux distro I’m afraid. At least I couldn’t find one when I was looking into this recently that was actively maintained.
Of course you can go with an older version of Debian.
Or you can give FreeBSD a spin. Still works nicely on those old machines, including the latest versions! (NetBSD and OpenBSD work too, but they are harder to install and their boot loader is pickier.)
Check out Adelie Linux[0]. I haven't committed to installing it on my iMac G4 yet, but I've tried the liveCD and it looks promising! It's been featured a few times on the "Action Retro" Youtube channel. (Incidentally, a rising star of my favorite youtube creators.)
my go-to writing system was a repaired (got two broken ones for free, cobbled together 1 working one) 800MHz Celeron Sony VAIO with an 800x600 LCD, xubuntu, and abiword. The thing /couldn't/ connect to the internet (required a dongle I didn't have) but had a USB port for using a thumbdrive.
E-waste is a really big issue. Looking after old computers and giving
them a genuine use is a good contribution to reducing pollution. I
wrote about this recently [1][2]. DOSBox on top of a minimal nix
install also works well as it emulates old video modes quite nicely.
I like doing writing work (wordperfect) on my old machines (286-486 era). It's the one task that I find is actually better on these old machines. My Model-M keyboard is better for typing, there are less distractions and I prefer looking at a CRT when writing. It's also somewhat ceremonial booting up the machine and running WP, so that helps getting into he writing mindset.
What makes this especially convenient is that I can save files direct to a CF card and interchange it with my modern machines. CF uses the same IDE interface as a vintage hard drive, so hooking up one of these solutions with old hardware is trivially easy.
I was exposed to several word processors at the time, and choose PC-Write[0] (shareware pioneer) as my primary tool. After becoming an advanced user of vi and nroff for various tasks (programming, desktop publishing), I found PC-Write to be the best tool when migrating to the PC world.
"One unusual feature of PC-Write was its implementation of free form editing: it could copy and paste a block of text anywhere."
Still to this day all of my command lines are dark-navy-blue with white text because of WP 5.1. I go a bit darker than the original, but its been that way for nearly 30 years now.
The dark-blue-with-light-text color scheme was used by MS-DOS based dev environments too back in the day. Both Microsoft's "Quick" and Borland "Turbo" series used it. It was even featured in the EDIT fullscreen editor on MS-DOS.
This is actually a good point... I have a very fast 16 core PC, but typing in Google Docs often has latencies. Everything in WP is instantaneous, even on my 6mhz 286.
Reminds me of https://danluu.com/input-lag/ - and I've been noticing it more and more as everything (even desktop apps) become "cloud apps" - everything is sluggish, which prevents typeahead and quick access.
Watching someone use the old text-based terminals you'd see at Frys or a bank vs watching them fight with a mouse-based web GUI is instructional; with the old text terminal you could enter the whole transaction as one long string of characters into the buffer, and even if it took time to load the screens, it would faithfully execute exactly as you ordered it to.
But they /almost/ do! I use an '86 IBM M as my daily driver, but I've bought two keyboards from https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD which still makes this style of keyboard. They're not nearly as broken-in as my M is of course, and the construction differs in a few insignificant (to me) ways, but the typing experience is identical. I'd recommend giving them a look if you're in the market.
I prefer CF cards because there's no signal conversion needed while SD card adapters needs conversion electronics. I'm not sure if the SD card adapters are any less reliable, but I've stuck to buying Startech CF adapters and have not had any issues yet. Plus, I have about 30 CF cards on hand so it's nice to still have a use for them.
A few months ago, I installed Windows 2000 onto an ancient ThinkPad T21. I then put Office 2000 on it. The intent was 'mono-focused' (I like that word) writing.
The project stalled, as I was stuck looking for a good offline dictionary/thesaurus to put on it, as I knew I would need it, most out there are horrible or online only.
I should resurrect the idea and blog about it really (directly from the aforementioned ThinkPad).
I think there's mileage in a 'Writers Distro' for Linux, which only bundles a set of apps for Writing, and NO network drivers.
It was mentioned in a different article on HN the other day a Professor somewhere who still swore by an old CD of Microsoft Bookshelf [1]. That Professor believed that the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Edition included in Bookshelf remains one of the best dictionaries ever assembled. Bookshelf CDs also included Roget's Thesaurus.
I use Artha on Linux, which uses the WordNet database. It's fast and convenient. My only issue is that I would prefer using a more up-to-date fork of the WordNet database as I don't think WordNet has been updated in a while.
I did something like this putting Linux Mint on a 2012 Macbook Air. My only requirements were that it run Simplenote and Firefox... everything beyond that was superfluous. So I could take it and try to focus on writing, though of course 90% of my distractions are in the browser anyway...
It is a nice thing to have around though. I would definitely follow a "mono-focused" writing device or distro.
Strangely I have lived almost exactly the same thing as the author (I had to check it wasn't me). The difference was that I bought the C64. I spent an unreasonable time connecting it to the wifi and I still haven't figured out the best way to SSH to my desktop.
To avoid distractions it's simpler just to turn off Wi-Fi or to take your laptop somewhere where there is no Wi-Fi you can access. I got a lot of programming done at my kids' piano teacher's house.
I need to run an old DOS program that communicates with a 9-bit serial protocol that need an ancient UART. This hardware is nearly unubtanium.
I think a good DOS emulator could fake this with an external - say arduino - device on the wire. I emailed the dosbox crew about this but got no response. Any ideas?
$XXXX specifically isn't likely for that era, at least anytime soon. If it's something rare or unique like the Thinkpad 701 with its butterfly keyboard, then it easily can go into hundreds. If they're normal machines in working order, then I wouldn't expect a ton, but many people want them for retro gaming or some other reason like the author does. Even a non-working machine has parts some people might want. I have a couple of working, but worse for wear machines with sentimental value that I've been trying keep an eye out for non-working counterparts to salvage and for spare parts. One of them is actually a Thinkpad 240 that's close to the 240x author got.
Get one setup as a "blast from the past" machine and try to sell it. I bet there's people out there that would pay for a nostalgia pentium ready to roll, especially if you did all the work getting it to go.
The Win 95 machine is on a private network for which the Pi is the router, so the SMB share is available without connecting win 95 to the internet.