I always felt a bit nostalgic for the IBM 5155 portable that I owned while at college. Slow, heavy, monochrome - but with a great keyboard. It was a little out-dated even then, but at that time everyone typically used the computer lab - very few students in the dorm had their own computers. The computer lab had the choice of Word or Word Perfect. Why would anyone use Word? Glaring background, slow, busy toolbar, endless font and formatting choices. I liked the visual simplicity of the Word Perfect 5.1 interface (forget about the function keys for a second..
and that's the only choice that ran on my PC. I don't remember the DOS version.
Anyway - if you miss your computer - you can try to recreate it! My old computer has long ago been parted out, but recently I took a chance on one from an eby auction and actually lucked out (you never really know how much rust...) But this one was super clean and was decked out with a six-pack plus card giving it 640k, two 360k floppy drives, and surprisingly also had a math co-processor (not even mentioned in the ad). Pretty slick!
I picked up Dos 3.30, because I thought that was proper for the era. Honestly, I didn't remember how sparse early DOS versions were - no edit, no move, so that's been 'fun'. Also picked up two copies of WordPerfect 5.1 (first one had some bad disks) and an XT-IDE Deluxe card from Blue Lava Systems (ever heard of them...) to add a CF hard drive. I'd like to give a quick shout out to
@modem7 for the resources he's compiled - I used them several times, but notably to get the astclock working and y2k compliant on the six-pack plus card, and also to
@mbbrutman for his useful dskimage tool and site detailing how to work with the old floppy disks.
It's been fun going down memory lane and re-creating my favorite PC with an IBM badge. I still have my old hard drive from the original thats been in a drawer for 30 years. Not sure if it will still work, but at some point I'll pick up a controller card and check it out. Here's a few pictures: