the image above is not a serious attempt, i gave up at several points (visibly,) it's just meant to contextualize this a bit
thinking about my replychost / LadyLandshark's replychost about preserving old computers, the problem that one inevitably runs into after descending past the tip of the iceberg is always the same: you are probably not trying to LARP a 1986 businessman.
I actually wanted to do this when I started youtubing. I wanted to make videos where I used machines as intended. I wanted to finally do something different than what everyone else does.
It's always frustrating to see a youtube video or reddit post or whatever about an old PC. Someone fires up a 486 with Windows 95, gets to the desktop, and... does what? Opens all the apps and goes "Yep There They Are." it's the same demo, every time. it's always the same apps, and you don't want to use them.
Maybe you want to need to use them. That's fine. Nostalgia, borrowed or firsthand, is nothing to be ashamed of. but at some point you gotta go "what am I actually doing here?" and I feel like a lot of people never really ask themselves, "am I done with this 1991 Mac I picked up four years ago? am I done with Macs entirely?" most people with a 1991 Mac turn it on once in a while and, I wager, just kind of let it sit at the desktop for a bit, maybe open some folders, but eventually just turn it off.
maybe you'll play a videogame, but there really aren't that many, and they aren't very deep. a few people can get replayability out of them but i'd guess most can't. certainly, it's not enough to justify keeping the whole machine around.
much like how mainframes existed in order to print invoices, 95% of what PCs were used for before the 2000s was office software. what you're supposed to do for an authentic Mac experience is to open Appleworks and make a spreadsheet. but you don't want to do that.
oh, you might open it and dink around with the cell borders, but are you going to find data and type it in? are you going to write formulas? i have never seen anyone do this, and even with my own earnest attempts to get myself to do it For The Vine as it were, I couldn't muster the effort.
I want to show people "here's what using this machine looked like, here's what the actual lived experience would have been," but god, the difference between the thought and the reality is just... exhausting. the reality is that the machine was built as a tool, and tools don't really do much of interest in themselves. the interesting thing is the output. but when the output is a tax return, it's hard to want to create it or view it, and it takes so long.
it's not interesting to put bogus data into a spreadsheet, or to type gibberish into a word processor. the only really meaningful way to interact with this stuff would be to LARP it - to actually do your taxes on a 1991 mac. but that intrudes into your life - it would be like trying to repair your car with tools from 1860. not long in, you're going to be sobbing and begging for a socket wrench. it's interesting to think about the objective badness of past eras; it's not fun or practical to inject that badness into your modern life, with its very real problems.
the reality is that doing your taxes on a 1991 Mac was about a hundred times slower. you couldn't copy and paste all your bill payment receipts out of your email because nobody was emailing receipts back then, and you couldn't IM your girlfriend and ask her to find your W2, scan it, and send it to you.
it would be ludicrous to slow down the process of solving your real, actual problems like this. even if you park your modern laptop next to your old machine to fill in those gaps, you're still going to be copying over all this data manually and looking at a lower resolution display on which you can see less info. you're just going to make your life worse, and no amount of huffing vibes is going to make that worthwhile. and to wit - nobody does this.
the financial software is Just Like Now, But Much Worse. the graphics software is Just Like Now, But Worse. there's nothing to see, or experience. This bad version of photoshop has The Old Window Borders, sure, but those don't make any difference once you've actually started working. Assuming, of course, that you have a use for the app in question at all. If you aren't an artist, then you can't even do anything with Photoshop but scribble, and I can tell you from experience: that's the same in everything, no matter how old.
A word processor is really the only thing that isn't an egregious waste of your time (as long as you're on a graphical system - WordPerfect is a hellish piece of shit) but that's because word processing hasn't changed in over 30 years, which just makes it even more pointless
assuming you can stand the keyboard you'll be forced to use, and assuming you don't mind having to get your finished file off the machine via floppy... you're not doing what you're doing any differently than you'd do it now. it's just on a lower resolution screen, with fewer keyboard shortcuts, etc.
and, of course, there's no way to make a retrocomputing demo more interesting this way. you wouldn't want to record this for the public to watch. assuming you wanted the public to see the whole process of writing or spreadsheeting, who would watch that? it just looks like work. it is work.
Personal computers prior to the late 90s were only built to solve a handful of problems, and they all tried to solve them the exact same way we do now, just stopping at the limits of technology. Likewise, a crescent wrench from 1930 might be made of different alloy than one from 2022, but it still just turns bolts. You have to go really far back to find one that's interesting at all to look at, one that's actually shaped differently, but even then, it's just going to turn a bolt, and the only interesting aspect will be that it sucks. "Yep, here I am, putting it on a bolt. Alright, I turned it. My hand hurts."
This all gets worse the further down the iceberg you go. This is just for the 1991 Mac. The 8086 PC is really hard to do anything remotely interesting with. The Unix workstation is mind numbing. the mainframe doesn't do anything at all.
it's a bummer, and I wish I knew a solution. like, this is just me being sad and disillusioned. sorry if you were looking for a point
It's funny you mention this because of retro devices I've bought over the last few years, and a good half a dozen of them were all actually to do boring application things with, or rather, one boring thing.
I'm a writer, but I'm also a writer with ADHD, and a terrible internet addiction. If you sit me in front of a computer and expect me to write, the odds of me actually doing that are shockingly low if I also have the opportunity to use that same computer to watch youtube and flip between the same dozen discord channels over and over.
My experience of writing on an iPad on a trip to Copenhagen, and a possibly apocryphal story about GRR Martin and Wordstar, gave me an idea: what if I just got a computer that couldn't internet, and did my writing on that?
This ... turned out to actually be harder than I expected, and not always for ways I even thought of. Everyone expects "oh but how will i get my work off the machine". No one expects "oh god, what the fuck are all these keys?"
Here's the thing: we live in a post-Macintosh world, but it took the world a hot minute to catch up.
I poked with multiple applications for DOS, Amiga, especially Word Perfect, and what you quickly realize when you do that is EVERYTHING IS WRONG. Everything works in bespoke, idiosyncratic ways, everything has weird keybindings you'll never remember, and indeed, we didn't at the time. Every person reading this who actually used WordPerfect when it was contemporary, I guarantee, had one of those stickers or templates that sat over the function keys that told you how the fuck to find anything.
And even apart from that, shit just works weird. Simple things like what your arrow keys do or how you highlight text are weird and strange. Some of it isn't even necessarily bad, after all millions of people used this stuff back when it was relevant, I know I did, but shit changed and you forgot all that and now you're just frustrated that whenever you highlight a word and start typing, you never seem to know what will happen.
GRR Martin can keep using WordStar because he never stopped using it. I on the other hand have lost whatever memory of WordPerfect I ever retained, and so it fades into the past as a vague fond memory of "reveal codes" and little else.
So: you get a Macintosh.
You get a Macintosh because everything works like it should, because everything after that just ripped off the Macintosh. It makes you appreciate how absolutely unreasonably fucking good that damn thing was for the time, that we're still using the same goddamn concepts 40 years later. Your copy/paste controls are on Cmd+XCV, Save is Cmd+S, the arrow keys work a little different because you've been on a PC now for a while, but the mouse works just like you want. You can run Word 5.1 on your Mac SE and it just kinda ... works.
I did, in fact, do exactly fucking this to write most of A Chip's Edge, the pilot series I wrote in 2020. At least the first 3 chapters were initially all written on my Mac SE. It was, in fact, pretty darn good as a distraction-free zone, and the writing process was more or less as pleasant on that as it would've been in FocusWriter on my main PC.
Buuuut, then you run into the old boring problems mentioned above: I gotta get my files off there. Word can fortunately just save to normal ASCII text files, so formats aren't an issue, so I get a FloppyEmu, save my stuff to a disk image on an SD card, load that SD card into a modern Mac, and remarkably, it can still mount the damn thing in 2020 so I just drag the text file over and into whatever website or whatever I wanna put it on. Of course I only use that Macbook for work, so then I gotta get it onto my actual main personal PC from there.
It's a bit of a pain though, and so damn manual, so I mess around with a Wimodem232, thinking maybe I can somehow modem it to another machine over the wifi ... but try as I might I can't get any damn terminal software to consistently talk to the damn thing.
I eventually gave up and bought a PowerBook G4. It's juuust new enough to be able to get online, enough to send email anyway, but old enough that actually trying to surf the web is mostly impossible. And I can run an old version of the same FocusWriter I use on my PC, so even the file formats are the same!
But also ... I have now literally clawed my way all the way back to the top of the iceberg in pursuit of a workflow that does what I want it to do.
I don't necessarily regret any of it, because I still enjoy messing with old computers ... but it's an expensive way to try and solve my attention span issues.
