🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 24 Apr 2018 12:55:20 -0700 (PDT), hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

>On Monday, April 23, 2018 at 10:08:33 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
>
>> >Microsoft and the hardware makers followed the auto industry
>> >model of planned obsolescence.  My old PC physically works 
>> >reasonably well, but the software is obsolete and difficult
>> >to use for many tasks since it is no longer compatible.
>> >
>> >Note that IBM provided old system compatibility going back 40 years.
>> >Would it kill the PC industry to provide that?  
>> 
>> The PC industry actually DOES provide old system compatibility going
>> back 40 years.  Getting back to the 16-bit DOS era and beyond requires
>> using an emulator, which is no hardship given that you're running
>> about a thousand times the clock speed with multiple cores..  But that
>> given, I can boot up a CP/M session on my gaming rig and run 8-bit
>> Wordstar just fine (once I've hexedited the configuration file to
>> match the terminal that the emulator pretends to have).
>
>FWIW, on a personal note, I looked into running an emulator
>so I could run old DOS/Windows applications.  However, 
>installing it seemed difficult (it's possible I needed to
>simply devote more time to it.)  However, I have little desire
>to "hexedit the configuration file" to make it all work.

I had to hexedit that same configuration file on my Z-89.  That's
nothing to do with Windows, that's all on CP/M.  Wordstar comes with
canned configurations for a variety of terminals.  If the one you have
isn't one of them then you have to hexedit the configuration file. And
most of the ones that it supports are long, long forgotten.  The
emulator provides a VT100 interface.

And compared to installing CP/M on a new machine back when CP/M was
current installing Virtual Box or vmWare Player on Windows is trivial.
>> >As mentioned, they upgrade and upgrade but really don't improve
>> >anything.
>> 
>> My newest machine can read my handwriting at least as well as the last
>> secretary I had and sometimes does what I tell it to do verbally.  It
>> also recognzes me when I boot it up.
>> 
>> However you talk about your "old PC physically works reasonably well
>> but the software is obsolete and difficult to use for many tasks since
>> it is no longer compatible".  With what is it not compatible that is
>> causing you problems?
>
>My MS-Word and Internet Explorer have a difficult time today.
>
>For instance, I send Word documents to friends.  They could only
>open it as Read-Only due to the old version.  They could not get
>around that restriction without going to a lot of trouble.  

I don't see how that makes the software more difficult to use than it
was when you first got it.  It makes data interchange more difficult,
however Word supports a wide range of formats with more added with
every version.

>As someone mentioned, I now use plain text files.  But things
>like italics and boldface get lost.  It's impossible to send
>a more formal document with headings and pagination.

I just tried saving a document in RTF format in Word for MS-DOS 5.5.
Word for MS-DOS can't show formatting except as a color change.  When
I opened the document with the latest version of Word, it came right
up with bold, italic, bold italic, and underline right where they were
supposed to be, looking much better than in Word for MS-DOS.

There is formatting that can be done with Word that won't carry
through to an RTF but for basic stuff of this nature it's fine.

>As to the Internet, more and more websites no longer operate
>on my browser.

So have you installed Firefox or Chrome?  More and more web sites
don't work on ANY Microsoft browser you know.