David's Computer Blog

Call for Submissions: Share Your Story, Written the Retro Way! Are you a writer who loves vintage technology?  Do you enjoy the charm of classic word processors?  Do you have a new retro Amiga keyboard that you''re wanting to use? Retro Words, Timeless Stories is an online short story exhibition where every entry must be created using a retro word processor  on vintage Commodore computers (be it real or emulated) such as  AmigaWriter, WordPerfect, ProWrite, Final Writer, Wordworth, Personal Write, or any classic software of your choice that ran on a Commodore 64/128/Amiga computer! This is more than a writing challenge—it’s an opportunity to blend nostalgia with creativity , bringing vintage digital tools back to life in a modern storytelling space. It's also an opportunity to use your new or old Amiga-based keyboard! These vintage tools provided a focused and tactile writing experience, free from modern-day distractions. Now, in this online exhibition , we celebra...

So I had this idea of installing a legacy word processor application onto an old Operating System. I decided to use OS/2 Warp 4 as the OS.  In the past I was a fan of OS/2 Warp. I liked its stability and its responsiveness. It was truly, in my opinion, better than Windows 3/95. In a previous experiment I tried working with OS/2 Warp 3, and I even bought a licensed copy off of Ebay several years ago. My copy of OS/2 Warp 3 came on 3.5" floppies and included  CD-ROMs.  I had installed OS/2 Warp 3 on an old computer, but I quickly realized that without Internet connectivity, it was hard to do much with it. Warp 3 was around at a time when the Internet was still young, so extra networking software was needed to browse the World Wide Web. After this realization, I moved on to other Operating Systems. For some reason I have lately been interested in using old Word Processing applications. I was researching WordPerfect and discovered there were two versions of it for OS/2: ...

  Recently I have been experimenting with word processing programs under AmigaOS 3. Years ago, back in the 90's, I used my A1200 with Final Writer to create term papers for college. Before I bought my A1200; however, I was using a Gateway 2000 computer running Windows 3.1 on an Intel 386DX/33 processor. For my old Gateway computer, I had landed on a word processor called Breeze. It was a simple, DOS based word processor that was free (shareware), which is the right price for a college student, and did everything that I need. None of my term papers needed graphics or clip art, so a basic word processor was all that I required. I still used Breeze on MSDOS even after I bought my A1200. A year or so after purchasing my A1200, I finally decided on buying Final Writer 5. It did word processing along with graphics, and it worked with my, at that time, high quality Epson dot-matrix printer. Final Writer did quite well for me. Along with my A1200, I was able to cr...