But he couldn't participate on a forum such as this with that kind of machine.
Precisely. Note that it's not Microsoft forcing him to upgrade, but his desire for more features, so he can e.g. access forums like this, that's driving the whole "bloatware" thing.
MS would probably be truly happy if users had to this day simply continued to find DOS 3.3 an acceptable "OS" and they could coast on selling that forever rather than spending a billion dollars a year or more on programmers to make more features demanded by the users.
i don't even know if you can participate with modern email on such a machine. I mean, I guess you can, I just don't know how long it takes to encrypt a modern TLS stream on that kind of hardware, and everything is encrypted today.
That's actually the real kicker if you want to go back to an older style of system: you need a certain amount of speed to deal with stuff you pretty much
have to have, such as encryption, decompression and large, high-res bitmap displays that are updated quickly for video. I've thought about this a bit, actually, and I think it could be done with a new, fairly simple CPU architecture (one
much more auditable than current x86 stuff) and an OS focused very heavily on true simplicity, as opposed to what people think of as simple when they look at it. But that's likely to go nowhere; even just abandoning overlapping windows, the desktop metaphor, and WYSIWYG editing (i.e., you edit what looks like the final output) is surely a non-starter for most of the world.
Are there any CP/M programs that can create Postscript?
Yes, and it even comes with the base CP/M system. It's called
ED.COM. :-P
In order to make it available and useful for others, I choose to simply use very commonly available and documented assemblers / linkers ... namely M80/L80 and Zilog's ZDS for some eZ80 stuff. Since I also use Z180's and prefer to use structured logic like IF-THEN-ELSE, I have a preprocessor that converts these structures and Z180 mnemonics into M80 source. For distribution purposes, I include both the structured source and the M80 source which gives the user an option as to which they're more comfortable with.
Not that this has anything to do with the topic, but I had just give you a big
for this. I really appreciate people both making tools to increase usability and, where possible, giving options to those who don't want to go learning those tools (or who just want to read stuff without running the tools to generate that stuff). This really shows some attention to making your readers' lives easier.
Last I checked, I can't run DOS under Windows, or on modern machines at all.
Yeah, DOS 3.3 probably doesn't boot on modern systems. But you get the general idea.
And more than once I've considered rolling back to Windows 7 but too much software that I do need just doesn't run on Windows 7 even.
Well, again, this is about what
you want to run. To you, it's more important to run that software than protest against bloated OSes by running older OSes. That's not uncommon (hell, I'm the same), and that's why we have bloatware. It's just not as important to avoid bloat as it is to run the latest software.
I run Linux too, but only for what Windows is absolutely hopeless at.
Well, you should perhaps consider reversing that and doing as much as you can on Linux, using Windows only for what Linux is absolutely hopeless at. Linux is in general less bloated from the start, and you have a
lot of options for reducing your bloat even more. For example, I don't even use any of the standard desktop systems (Gnome, KDE, etc.); I use a much simpler (and
much smaller) setup consisting of the FVWM2 window manager,
xfce4-panel, and a small handful of other programs for input methods and so on. The whole desktop configuration/startup is
literally fifteen lines of code, and it's clear
exactly what's going on and what's being run.
Between that and being a heavy user of command-line utilities, pretty much the only real bloatware I run any more (on Linux, at least) is my web browser and, arguably, KiCad. (The other visual tools I use, such as Zathura for viewing PDFs, are pretty non-bloaty.)
I don't hate Microsoft though - I absolutely love their Surface Books - and am using one now. But the OS no longer serves the user.
Well, I'd disagree; Windows 10 is one of the best versions of Windows I've seen since I started seeing Windows back in 1990, and I think it's finally better than MacOS when it comes to usability. (It only took MS 30 years!
) But that's definitely a topic for another thread and, anyway, MS may be ruining this with Windows 11.
I live ever hopeful that one day we'll see a half-decent anti-trust case against Microsoft that forces them to open up the OS, and then maybe people will write Windows-Lite type OSs that can do most of what Windows does, but without the pain.
We have that; it's called "Linux" (plus your desktop system of choice). Though I suspect what you're looking for is compatibility with existing Windows applications, which basically by definition is never "lite" and the source of much (probably
most) of the pain of Windows.