A little fun with old tech

 Having a bit of fun tonight with some old tech that I used to use heavily (and may I say brilliantly) back in the 1990s.   WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

 I have an ancient copy of WP from way back when, and used a setup with a DOS... emulator?  Anyway, a DOS box running inside Windows 10 called vDOS, which is pre-configured to work specifically with WP.  Nice thing about WP DOS (not so much the Windows versions) was its focus initially on inputting content -- creating correspondence or news articles first, long before one gets to the point of worrying about formats and layouts.  I prefer this way of working.  Create good content, and formatting is a matter of not screwing it up.  Format first, and to me the content is weaker and less valuable.  Maybe "The medium is the message," or part of it.  But it isn't all of the message, and after a certain point the medium gets in the way of effective messaging.

WP DOS lets me write the way I write this blog, content first.  But it also does fully-justified text by default.  Software that can import from WP DOS produces output that may be simpler, but has a better shot at high quality content.  Hard to explain, I suppose.  If you know what I mean, it's obvious, and if you don't, you might never get the point.

I'm not a brilliant writer.  But WP DOS, I think, allows me to be a better writer than I might otherwise have been.

 Another thing I suspect from my experience.  I was an early adopter of what was called "desktop publishing."  I'd create newsletters and flyers, taking advantage of the fairly new graphic tools available in the 90s.   But the impact of Microsoft Word and other software with similar design philosophy has created so much "pretty" junkmail that I don't think people even look at a lot of the content.  It's a blur and discarded before reading more than the apparent headlines and glancing at the pictures.

 Even DTP based on work from WP DOS tended to be better, because the first task was saying what needed to be said.  Layout and art and such was all secondary.  You got more meaningful material, and people expected that -- back when news was news and not just clickbait and top 10 lists (said the old guy).