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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.

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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.

It's possible to go very far down this rabbit hole, and end up browsing Sony GDM-FW900s from 2003 for thousands of dollars.

Which is why I dusted off the old one :) -- can't justify 3k in any sensible universe!

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.

monochrome monitor here. something about that display that is so calming and work inducing

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 :-)

Driver support might be an issue - and it might run TOO fast!

Single threaded only though! So you leave a huge amount of that i9 performance on the table.

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).

[0] https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-lim...

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 also think Word 97 is the pinnacle of word processing. I run it in a Windows Me Virtual Machine and post the texts to my blog using IE6 :)

Have you tried wine? I image that word 97 would run great in it.

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.

But it was at least an exercise

Nice! Dont you have a problem occasionally wanting to play some Doom on the side? :'D

Mostly UT99 with the GLIDE renderer on my 3DFX Voodoo 3, but I consider it inspiration ;-)

Haha, perfect!

Have you tried abiword for word processing?

Why don’t you have the pi upload to google drive? Have the smb mount point to a rclone mount that’s google drive. Skip a hop :)

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.)

Yer right! I had no clue they retired Debian on 32 bit PPC! End of an era!

Wrong https://t2sde.org/architectures/powerpc64/

That's a 64 bit G5. It won't work on a G3/G4.

Well it wasn't specified. But here https://t2sde.org/architectures/powerpc/

That’s…………not Debian

It is a Linux which builds and supports PPC Big Endian in 2022

The official port is dead, but unofficial development builds are still available. E.g. here https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/current/ is a Debian 11 netinst for `powerpc`. More information at https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/

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.)

[0] https://www.adelielinux.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLLfCgBu96M

PPC Linux can be had from the T2 Linux distribution! https://t2sde.org/architectures/powerpc64/

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.

I got so much work done on that thing.

Abiword is very unstable, I do not recommend it unless you save at every keypress.

Ted may work better, now it has a GTK2 interface instead of Motif.

I write my journals on VM370CE V1R1.1 (running on sdl-hercules) i love the editor and it's completely distraction free.

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