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Comment by protoman3000 | Hacker News Reader

Who uses these things productively as daily driver in 2023? No judgement, just curious.

Do people have to be constantly productive all day every day? Maybe someone just has some old games they want to play, and they want a more modern shell to do it with.

But if productivity is the only thing you recognize, I recall reading that George R.R. Martin uses an incredibly old PC to write on. I think it was DOS or maybe Windows 3.1.

IIRC he uses a DOS machine with WordStar.

I remember stories of famous authors using one-off word processor devices (imagine: old LCD that can only show about 5 lines of text, and the device can hold a megabyte of crap in some sort of flash or something similar) from back in the day. Basically the minimal step up of computerization from the typewriter.

What else does a writer really need?

-A spell checker

- A dictionary/thesaurus

- Grep

- A few MB of public domain books in TXT format from Gutenberg to get inspired

I think those retro projects are mostly just for fun. There is nostalgia involved, but also those older systems tend to be easier to tinker with.

The copyright in the source code has a big jump from 2007 to 2022, so I guess possibly no-one, it's probably more entertainment/skills development for someone who finds modern always-on internet computers too distracting.

I sometimes used Calmira when I was in school until I switched to RedHat 5.1.

I use a handful of modern projects on a Mac running System 7 for “productive” purposes. I don’t use the computer itself for work, but I program on it, manage my servers on it, keep my household information recorded on it (bills, budget, power usage, etc), write on it, etc.

Beyond being distraction free it doesn’t remind me of my work computer, which helps doing things on it not feel like an extension of my day job.

In all fairness I’m pretty weird in this regard. I don’t see it as a toy, or fun retro thing, and it’s not a nostalgia thing, it’s just a computer and experience that I enjoy using to accomplish things I would have had to do anyway.

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