I am so excited to tell you that I am writing this blog post on my little old Acer Aspire One netbook, running MS-DOS 6.22 and Professional Write for DOS — the same setup I wrote with in the 1990s!
The reason I’m so excited to tell you this is that after spending more hours than I care to admit setting up this little computer and getting it to work just the way I want to, I can’t figure out what the hell else to do with it.
I believe what I am doing is what young people call “retrocomputing.” I call it “not throwing away a perfectly good working computer just because it’s old and has been obsolete for over a decade.” My wife calls it “time that could have been spent changing the brakes on my pickup truck which you’ve been promising to do since the Obama administration.”
I won’t bore you with the efforts it took to get this little computer running /just so/; suffice it to say that I got MS-DOS set up, installed Professional Write, and started reliving that 1990s computing experience…
…and now I am remembering how bad computing sucked in the 1990s.
I mean, seriously — I know we didn’t have Google Maps and had to use a paper atlas to figure out where we were going, but /how the blessed hell did we live/???
Granted, it was very cool to see this little computer boot up and give me a near-instant C:> prompt*, then type CD APPS\PW and PW to boot up my word processor. Young people don’t know how to do that, just like they don’t know how to drive stick-shifts.
* Back In The Day, this /wasn’t/ cool. The cool thing to do was to load up your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT with all sorts of utilities so that your computer took extra-long to boot, all the while spewing out lines and lines of technojargon. The more stuff your computer did before you could actually, y’know, use it, the cooler you were.
But now that I’m here, well… it’s terrible.
First thing I miss: Autosave. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to lose more than six nanoseconds’ worth of work, because whatever you create is instantly zapped to the hard drive and then to the cloud and then to China and then to the server farms of whatever secret cabal of government agents /really/ runs things. Contrast that with this computer where, if I don’t crtl-s this shizzle on a regular basis, every blessed word is at risk.
It really is at risk, too; this computer is battery powered, and I have no idea how long the battery is going to last because MS-DOS has no way of telling you that. This whole essay could disappear in a second, which I’m sure anyone who has read to this point would consider a merciful blessing.
Actually, there were DOS word processors that had an autosave function; specifically WordPerfect 5.1. I have a copy of WP5.1 on this computer, and I do intend to learn it, which is something I have been meaning to do for — holy hell, more than half my life, now that I do the math. I cannot come up with a funny way of telling you how outdated Word Perfect is, because version 5.1 predates the invention of the simile. Trust me, WP is very old and it is /very/ complicated.
WP works on function-key commands — not nice easy ones like Professional Write, here, which has a helpful little menu (F1-Help, F2-File/Print, F3-Edit, etc.) atop the screen. WP presents you with nothing but a blank blue screen and your text. No menus, just a senseless series of function codes. F7 saves and exits. F10 saves without exiting. Shift-F7 is bold, Ctrl-F7 indents, and Alt-F7 calls up Lipson’s Delicatessen and orders you a pastrami on rye, extra pickles and don’t be stingy with the Russian dressing. Or something like that. As I said, I haven’t learned WordPerfect yet.
Second thing I miss: Ctrl-Z. That’s right, li’l children, there was no “undo” in the dark old DOS days. Actually, that’s not true; WP51 can undo your last three changes. I believe the key combination is Ctrl-Shift-F5, which you must press on your next-door neighbor’s computer on a rainy Wednesday of any month with an R in the name.
Also, no mouse. Here in Professional Write, in order to mark a block of text to do something with it, you have to arrow to one end of it, then press Ctrl-T (or F3 and select Mark), then arrow to the end of it, then press F10, then figure out what you want to do with your freshly-highlighted text, which is pretty easy because your choices are limited to cutting it (Del) or copying it (Ctrl-C) and pasting it elsewhere (Ctrl-P — bet you didn’t expect that, didja?) or changing its margins. I’m not sure how this is done in WordPerfect, but I believe it involves the F4 key and a goat.
Truth is, Professional Write is little more than a glorified text editor, which is kind of funny, since it presumably cost around $90 in the ’90s, which is approximately $4 billion in 2024 dollars, while DOS’ EDIT.COM was free. (I’m pretty sure I used a pirated copy of PW back then, which I justified because my mother bought me its predecessor, PFS:Write, for my Apple //c. The statute of limitations is up, right? Right?)
There’s no real-time spell-checking, either. In PW, you can only run a spell check on demand by pressing Crtl-V. Let’s do that now, shall we?
Oops, I have to arrow up to the beginning of the document to do this. Bear with me, this should only take a week.
OK, done. Here is a list of the words PW did not recognize:
Blog
Acer
Netbook
1990s (huh???)
Retrocomputing
Obama
Google
Technojargon
Autosave
Shizzle (I guess Snoop Dogg used WordPerfect)
WordPerfect (FU, competition — and Snoop Dog)
Lipson’s (apparently sotware engineers are goys)
I would have made this a bulleted list, by the way, but bullets don’t exist in Professional Write. Neither do italics, hence my use of /slashes/. It can underline things (which appears on the screen not as underlined text, but as yellow text; WYSIWYG is years in the future), but I didn’t underline any words lest I frustrate any readers under the age of 30 who can’t understand why nothing happens when they click on them.
While I will admit to a little frustration at first, as I type this essay, I find it’s all coming back to me. I’ve successfully Ctrl-T’d a bunch of text and deleted it. When I used the word “didja”, there was no autocorrect to change it to “dogma” or “ninja”. Actually, that’s one of the things I really like about this old-timey experience: PW’s spell check found several misspelled words, but it doesn’t automatically suggest corrections, let alone highlight them with a stupid red squiggly line. PW will only suggest other spellings if you specifically ask. I love this attitude: PW’s base assumption is that /it/ is wrong, whereas modern word processors operate under the assumption that /you/ are wrong.
Best of all, and this really is the best part, I have been writing for 30 minutes straight without alt-tabbing over to the browser to check the news or read about the epic fights between Tom Hanks and the director during the filming of The Green Mile. (Of course, if I could alt-tab over, I’d be able to name that director.) I realize now that in my zeal to recreate those misspent, sex-free periods of my youth, I have created the perfect distraction-free word processor. No wonder I was so prolific in the 1990s!
You know what… maybe computing in the 1990s didn’t suck so bad after all. Matter of fact, n
(Sorry about that abrupt ending. The battery died, and I can’t remember what I wrote since the last time I pressed Ctrl-S.)
© Aaron Gold