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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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).
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 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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.