I love staring at these screenshots and spinning up a DOSBox every now and then and going thru 1-2-3, FoxPro, WordStar and so on.
I don't know what I'm looking for from them, does anyone else have a clue?
Nowadays, our computers have instant access to an uncountable amount of storage, information, and software through the Internet, and even local storage is enormous. Back then, the world was much smaller; the software and data you had in your small hard disk and boxes of floppy disks (and perhaps tape, etc.) was all that you had, and you didn't have a constantly online network to distract you with an unlimited fire hose of nonstop information.
That led to a closer relationship between you and the software on your computer. You had time to explore each and every corner of the software, and to read its manual (be it in the form of an online help or a paper book) from cover to cover. The software stayed the same; there was no automatic online update, no security scare blaming you for staying on a release that's more than a day old. You knew your software and hardware limitations, and adapted to them; they would stay the same until you bought more hardware, or new software (which came in colorful physical boxes, that you could put on a shelf).
We have gained much since, but lost some of that sense of wonder, of making the most of memory and storage measured in megabytes or even kilobytes, processors with speeds measured in megahertz or even kilohertz, and displays with few lines and columns of characters and little color.
Now if my Internet goes down my $$$$ M1 Pro might as well be a freaking paperweight; there’s absolutely nothing to do.
Incidentally I'm also into retro games (Spectrum, CPC, MAME, DOS) for pretty much the same reasons. In particular the memory/nostalgia is so strong because, as you put it, "the world was much smaller; the software and data you had ... was all that you had".
Those games took long enough to load and were expensive enough (for a kid) to acquire that when they finally launched I stuck with them and got value from them. Modern games are (tens of?) thousands of times larger yet they are lost in a sea of content.
I can only speak for me, but perhaps others feel the same way. It is nostalgia for me because this is the first way I experienced a computer, when everything was new to me and anything was possible. Until we got a computer, the only window outside of the world of my city was a TV, but a computer ran software of all sorts, and games, and others knew how it worked and could teach me stuff. Then the Internet came and I could talk to people anywhere in the world! What a thing this was.
Now, I spend all day looking at screens. I get paid to make them work, and that's cool, but the wonder and magic of it all is gone, and I miss it. DOS and text apps just happened to be my first interface, and everyone longs for their first love.
On a slightly more tactical angle, I really like typing and my keyboard, and terminal apps make it so I don't have to move my hands to a mouse and change contexts. A small thing, but it adds up. Yes, some stuff is easier with a mouse, but it's always fun to not have to change between input devices for long stretches of time.
When you use a computer every day then sometimes anything that is different feels novel. It might be the nostalgia of an older UI or it could be listing over something new but yet to be released.
With 'modern' web-based business software, most of them implement a date field with a pop-up mousing widget. You may or may not be "allowed" to type at all, or it may not be obvious how to, and you might need 47 mouse clicks and 15 seconds to enter a DOB in the 1970s. And screens are usually not laid carefully out at all, so even with small amounts of info on the screen, there may be plenty of whitespace, necessitating scrolling back and forth constantly.
A phone number field, likewise, may throw errors for using or not using the "expected" punctuation. Etc.
Stuff like that would be considered an absolute failure in the old text interfaces but it's the norm now that UIs are clunky and inefficient.
PS: None of this would be difficult in the web stack, it seems like the "UI/UX" designers (when they even exist) care exclusively about aesthetics.
I AM AMAZED that the average Pascal program of the day compiled faster on my old 386 than the average program compiles today in the latest and greatest workstation. Also don't get me started on cloud remote desktops. Go compare the immediacy of this garbage vs an old DOS computer in most applications.
About the UI... Dozens of flashing buttons, toasts and pings vs a Zen interface where you can, well, just focus on work.
I’m not using any of those other old things you mention, but I love how I can run my full Emacs-configuration locally in a TTY, remotely over SSH or whatever with no loss of functionality.
Having that capability is IMO a strength, not a weakness, and I wish more software was like that.
Since it is ported to Linux, you could run it remotely over ssh over slow and high latency connections with no issue. It also opens and operates instantly on any computer you can find.
The nostalgia is mostly about seeing what was possible withing limited hardware, and realizing we could do better with less.
For me, I use these tools in my daily life because the normal internet is just too damn noisy and gamified and addicting. I'm big on the slow internet movement and browsing the internet in w3m is a huge boon to focusing on what really matters: the words.
Then you will understand why George R.R. Martin wrote all the Game of Thrones books on his elderly Wordstar DOS PC, and will not touch a GUI.
Plus almost anyone could write programs, I saw some amazing programs created as COM files.