🚀 go-pugleaf

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reasonably well, but the software is obsolete and difficult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.


> 
> >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 but the software is obsolete and difficult to use for many tasks since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.  

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.

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