Hacker News Reader

Comment by bstar77 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Ah! Wordperfect - best word processor on DOS by far.

It's what I used as a kid, so it's all I know from that era. I still have those templates on my keyboard.

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."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write

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.

And the Zortech editor.

Lower input latency, too, which makes for more-pleasant typing.

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.

A local app will have less latency than a networked one running in a browser.

Depends, a local app which is an Electron app....

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.

I also use a Model M. they don’t make them like that any more!

I use an IDE to SD card adapter rather than CF, as SD cards are super cheap and easy to image.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com