I know of an older couple running 3.11, wife is a writer and she refuses to use anything other than wordperfect.
No internet, and just a printer.
Every time they call me out to service it they treat me like a long lost grandson with food and the occasional knitted gift so I don’t mind despite the fact that just keeping their (no joke) Pentium II (the edge slot version) alive is frankly one of the hardest projects I’ve ever had in my career. And I’ve had to service government software…
More like a critical computer running at the heart of a billion dollar company running software written in a long forgotten language against apis that no longer exist.
Yeah, I have a w3.1 machine and I play with it regularly, but it really lacks as a daily driver. On the other hand, my w98 machine can do basically everything I need for work, except web browsing. It’s fascinating how little have operating systems progressed in the last 25 years, user-facing wise.
I collect vintage and iconic computers as a hobby, and the only reason i bought a win98 machine was so I could play DOS games on the real hardware. But otherwise yeah, it can do most things youd use a modern computer for very well other than it shouldnt connect to the internet.
$20 says there’s at least one person out there still running Win3.1 daily.
I know of an older couple running 3.11, wife is a writer and she refuses to use anything other than wordperfect.
No internet, and just a printer.
Every time they call me out to service it they treat me like a long lost grandson with food and the occasional knitted gift so I don’t mind despite the fact that just keeping their (no joke) Pentium II (the edge slot version) alive is frankly one of the hardest projects I’ve ever had in my career. And I’ve had to service government software…
Set them up with a VM on a newer machine
100% computers are out there still running it. But I doubt it is anyone’s daily driver. More like a secondary rig.
More like a critical computer running at the heart of a billion dollar company running software written in a long forgotten language against apis that no longer exist.
Yeah, I have a w3.1 machine and I play with it regularly, but it really lacks as a daily driver. On the other hand, my w98 machine can do basically everything I need for work, except web browsing. It’s fascinating how little have operating systems progressed in the last 25 years, user-facing wise.
I collect vintage and iconic computers as a hobby, and the only reason i bought a win98 machine was so I could play DOS games on the real hardware. But otherwise yeah, it can do most things youd use a modern computer for very well other than it shouldnt connect to the internet.
You can connect it to the internet, just be in the mindset that anything you do on it someone else can see it.
Just please don’t connect it to a network
George RR Martin writes all his books on an old ass computer:
https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/how-george-r-r-martin-writes-on-an-old-school-dos-computer/
But you are right, if it was his daily driver we’d have more books out by now…