Why use old computers and operating systems?
john.ankarstrom.se
john.ankarstrom.se
As I mentioned in several other comments, I use Word 97 to do most of my writing. It is a pleasure to use, frictionless, accessible, and never nags me. (As much as I miss Clippy, I unchecked that option in the installer.)
I've read it runs great in Wine, but I thought it would feel more at home in a Windows ME virtual machine. (Since the hardware is virtualized, there are no stability issues.)
Compared to anything released today, both FOSS and payware, it is leaps and bounds ahead. And, of course, it is no surprise, since during its development, including thousands of hours of user studies, the primary goals were accessibility, usability, and polish.
Also, running inside a VM, and sharing resources with my development toolkit, it's still more responsive than anything else I've tried.
One of the memories I have from adolescence is of a laptop that one of grandparents' friends showed me in around 2010. It was a decade old at that point, and ran both Windows and Office 2000.
I remember booting up Excel, which loaded almost instanteously, and immediately started entering formulas into the cells with no input lag whatsoever. Word 2000 was a similar experience. Keep in mind this was on late 90's to early 00's _laptop_ hardware - maybe an 800MHz single core Pentium at best, and was an order of magnitude more responsive than Office 2010 on a then-current 3.33Ghz Core2 Duo.
It seems things have become even worse since then - IM Apps that chew up 2GB of RAM (and I'm not just talking about Slack), email apps that cause games to lag if they're running in the background, and websites that scroll at 10fps.
I think the software world is large and complex enough for these cycles to take a while, but it's very much a case of the old saying:
Bad software creates strong developers, strong developers create good software, good software creates weak developers, weak developers create bad software.
This pattern comes in macro and micro cycles. A good example of the micro cycle can be observed in Windows releases, which generally have alternated between solid and weak starting with 3.1 (counting 95b and 98b as separate releases from 95a and 98a.)
The macro cycle seems to take much longer, and we're just now starting to swing the other way.
The beauty of the software world, as this article illustrates, is that it's feasible to freeze your environment at a good place and keep it there until the next solid software cycle.
It's not possible with everything, but I've found that if I stick to either FOSS or emulated abandonware, I am in a pretty good place. I've abandoned Apple and Windows except for testing, and am very happy for it.
I am blessed in that I am relatively patient and technically minded, and also have relatively few and simple demands. With these two blessings working in my favor, I've been able to set up with relative ease a system which works for me and doesn't change itself around without me asking.
As much as I've tried, I was not able to achieve the same experience without FOSS, and I'm forever grateful to all involved in bringing me this experience. It's not as polished, but it's also not as arrogant and disruptive, a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
>Bad software creates strong developers
In my opinion more so it allows a foothold for operators who should never get near development.
Every feature, even the tiniest, was user-tested for many hours, testers spent thousands of hours running through every option, usability and accessibility experts pored over every widget to ensure it looked perfect and had a keyboard shortcut, etc.
It also helped that there was no "moving target" release cycle. There was no fixing it once the gold master was approved.
And the result is a very nicely put together suite of applications with pixel-perfect toolbars, icons, dialogs, etc. that just beams quality.
Their leadership was consistent that no version of Microsoft Office allowed greater personal productivity than Office 97. They had worked with them all up to that point, always modernizing at the bleeding edge.
In hindsight the only reason for newer versions of Office was thought to be occasions where there was an extreme need for features not present in Office 97.
Of course it had always been too late for them to do anything about it since they were so modern they were the ones tasked with dropping earlier versions as soon as possible after a new version was released.
Naturally that depth of knowledge will never be replaced.
I still think classic Mac OS was a truly gem of UI and UX and things just went downhill from there :)
I'm reading the "Patterns" book by Christopher Alexander, it's about architectural patterns that feel human and it very much relates to what's happening in the UI/UX area. E.g. a lot of traffic around tends to move people inside houses as they feel the outside is not theirs anymore.
Similarly UI that jumps around or reduces the interaction to answering questions also changes the behavior of users as they feel powerless. The current Mac OS is less guilty in this aspect, I guess, I'm ranting about the overall trend.
a) SheepShaver doesn't quite emulate the experience, e.g. the mouse movements appear to have a slight lag, some icons don't draw, etc. and
b) I didn't manage to set up network there and found no guide of how to get files to that VM in any other way.
So overall I decided to just try a real machine and got it for around ~$50 in the local fleamarket. Tried Ebay first, found a great candidate (Powerbook G4 1Ghz/Ti, last model capable of booting Mac OS 9), but there was quite a few bidders and the price went up to ~$450, so I passed.
If your vintage browsers support some old JS, you could also have the proxy to do a a very simple kludge to patch JS going through it to fix some URLS, but not all (because The Halting Problem).
Bonus of a transforming proxy: if there are bad known vulnerabilities in some vintage browsers that can't be fixed, the proxy might be able to filter at least some exploits. (But you might not tackle cross-origin vulnerabilities in any case, so keep that in mind.)
(Site was throwing a Wordpress error)
If it turns put to be really useful and fun, you probably wont hear about it online.
I've got a working Turbo Pascal compiler, C-compiler, and Microsoft BASIC. Of course it isn't standalone, as it needs a host computer to communicate with it over a serial-port, but it's still surprisingly useful.