-=> Quoting Kurt Weiske to Nancy Backus on 12-22-14  10:02 <=-

 NB>> Welcome back... have you been lurking all this time...?

 KW> I've been here and linked all this time, just didn't have anything
 KW> to say. :)

Well, then, you should have just piped up and started a new topic... ;)
Anything related to memories and older times is fair game... ;)
 
 NB>> I've never tried it, never had to, being as I've never left DOS... But
 NB>> I know plenty of others, either in the more recent Windows versions or
 NB>> (I think) in Linux, that have used it successfully...  :)   Good luck
 NB>> on your experiment... ;)

 KW> I'd love to hear more about how/why you stayed with DOS. What kind of
 KW> computer are you running on? Have you had to figure any workarounds?
 KW> Do you use any DOS IP apps, like a text browser?

The why is easy... it does what I need, and doesn't require me to use a
pointing device of any sort.  Also it's smaller, simpler, less prone to
viruses (being pretty much under the radar nowadays)... I'm on an early
Pentium (post math coprocessor bug) with the original hard drive.  It
also has 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives (1 each), a CD-ROM and a 100M
Zipdrive.

Any workarounds (if any) were figured by the resident computer Wizard,
who does tricky stuff (including most maintenance and installations).
When my original monitor started getting flaky he replaced it with a
flat-screen NEC.  I'm typing this in MicroEMACS 3.8b for DOS, and my
text browser is Lynx for DOS...  It's DOS 7, the computer came with
Win95 installed, and the first thing the Wizard did was to make the DOS
the actual boot.  At one point, I could call up Win95 to do anything
that really required gui, but now it's not really functional at all. 
Recently installed on this machine is a form of linux that I can get
into, and that allows me to use Links or Chrome as browsers, but I've
only done that a couple of times and so far only with supervision... ;)

 KW> Part of my DOS experiment will need hardware -- I want a 4:3 monitor
 KW> that does 25 rows/80 columns. Of all of the things I see missing from
 KW> the current state of computing, I miss highly legible text and
 KW> single-tasking the most.

I can understand why.  Expecially as I haven't lost that at all.. :) 
The closest I come to multitasking is having some music playing on the
CD-ROM while working on something on the computer... or shelling out to
DOS to check something when in a program...  :)

 KW> WHen I write fiction on Windows I use a full screen app and turn off
 KW> my wireless card -- that helps with focusing on the task at hand. I'd
 KW> love to fire up QEDIT or VDE and do the same.

I don't see why that couldn't be possible.  Any really technical
questions I'd have to refer to the Wizard, of course... :)  I do ok once
I've learned the magic spells for things... ;)  I often refer to myself
as the sorcerer's apprentice having learned the "brooms" lesson not to
invoke anything I don't know the counterspell for...  ;)

ttyl        neb

... Don't open the WINDOWS, you'll let the BUGS in!

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20