On Sat, Jan 27, 2024 at 4:51 PM Dan Schmidt via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Now, that's an interesting use for a Dos/FreeDOS retro computer: > > https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin-uses-dos-wordstar-to-write > > How many computers destined for the landfill still have perfectly good > screens and keyboards? (Recalling those heavy, grey, indestructible > PS2 keyboards where the keys snapped back up with a vigour that > seemed to sent your fingers flying on to the next character) Now, > I might have gone with WordPerfect 6 instead of WordStar 4, but the > idea itself is solid: A computer that you just use for writing, sans > distractions. No YouTube, no Email, no Facebook - you sit - you write. > I mean, it's hard to argue it didn't work well for this guy!
I know I'm kind of an odd duck among my friends, but I'm with George R.R. Martin on this. (Not the first time I've seen this article from 2014.) DOS is pretty good at the distraction-free environment, necessitated by the limitations of the era. A distraction-free environment is great for certain kinds of work, especially writing. Actually, I've seen other, similar articles from different writers who do the same. There's an example of a professional screenwriter (don't remember the name) who still used a DOS word processor in 2020 to write movie scripts. It was specialized software aimed at writing scripts, and it only ran on DOS. This person said they had an office set up just for writing, with a dedicated DOS-only laptop for writing. If he needed to look up something on the Internet (or wanted to check email) he had a separate computer for that. I'm not sure how he transferred files from DOS to his other computer, but you can use a USB drive for that. There's a lot of DOS software that's still great in 2024. And I'd argue some tools haven't gotten much better since the DOS days. My favorite spreadsheet (on any platform) is As Easy As on DOS. That saw me through my undergraduate program. If I didn't need to share spreadsheets with anyone else, I think As Easy As could manage 99% of my spreadsheet needs. And probably 100% if I just accepted that some things worked differently (only 16 text colors and 16 background colors for conditional formatting of cells, for example .. As Easy As ran in VGA mode so could do 16 background colors). I also experimented with using Word for DOS 5.5 as a "distraction free" writing environment, and it works well. Word 5.5 uses modern keybindings like ctrl-c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, etc (I didn't use earlier versions of Word, might be the same there too, don't know) so my fingers don't have to re-learn how to select text. If I did more writing that didn't require special formatting (I rely on styles for my tech writing these days) I'd probably be able to get by with Word 5.5. And LibreOffice Writer can read the files, too. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
