A useful writing tool.

[Lady Smith]

I made the change over to using a computer as a writing tool slowly and with great reluctance.  For some years I used a succession of ancient second hand electric typewriters.  The last one I owned, an old golf-ball IBM, sounded like a machine gun, but it saw me through all my assignment work while I was studying to be a social worker before it finally blew up.

Next came an IBM 8088 XT PC which was considered obsolete even when I purchased it for a seriously cheap price.  I used DOS based word processors and the simpler they were the better.  Any word processor program which gets in the way of my creative flow is doomed to be deleted.  I used Easywriter for years simply because it worked.  Wordperfect for DOS I hated with a vengeance and it didn't help either that my first employer as a brand new social worker had Wordperfect as the sole word processor program installed on their computer network.

At home I'd moved up to a 386 IBM PC by now and was about to change over to a 486DX-4-100 which I'd just built up for myself.  I needed a copy of DOS 6.2 and headed off to the local computer emporium to get one.  Up until now I'd always purchased all my computer wants at a monthly computer geek bring and buy fair so actually setting foot inside a for real computer store was a new experience for me.
My request for a copy of DOS 6.2 was looked upon with much surprise by the computer store staff and the upshot was that I came away from the store with a copy of Windows 95 instead.  Thus began my love/hate relationship with modern word processing programs and Microsoft Word in particular.

Move onto 2015 and just this past week I discovered an application for Chrome called 'Writer'.  Oh my delight knew no bounds.  It's a plain WYSIWYG text writer with green letters on a black background and it looks and feels just like my beloved DOS text writers that I used to use.  A bonus is that it has an option to sound like either a mechanical or electric typewriter.  I love having the typewriter sound turned on because it gives my writing a rhythm that I used to really enjoy back when I was still using a typewriter.
The urge to write is back with me and as it happens my daughter is also doing a major reconfigure of our home network as well as changing us over to Debian 8 Linux.  So I really do need an operating system neutral text writer that is completely transportable between all or any of our household computers and 'Writer' completely fills the bill.

I warmly recommend that you give 'Writer' a go.  It's free, but if you want the 'pro' level enhancements it's $5.00 a month.  I've gone for the 'pro' options because it's worth it to me to have them now that I'm back with writing seriously again.

[Tysilio]

Do you remember line editors, Anne? Pre-PCs, pre-Windows, pre-WYSIWYG.... I wrote my dissertation on one, using a dumb terminal attached remotely to the campus mainframe. One sentence per line, each line numbered? It made moving around and editing so easy, once you got used to it. And, yeah, I sorta miss the black screen with the white, then green or gold, text.

Then they came out with "word processors." I was convinced for quite some time that they worked sort of like Cuisinarts -- had some evidence for that, too.

Dinosaur, I am.

[Lady Smith]

Dinosaur tech is good

All my electric typewriters came from curbside hard rubbish collections and took very little to get working well again. Free tech is the best tech
Fun fact: It is very very difficult to accidentally delete what you've just written when you're using a typewriter.

I missed out on the mainframe terminal experience Tysilio, but my computer tech daughter knows all about them.  Writing and editing for long periods of time on a modern white screen word processor really screws up my eyesight so I've always loved black screen DOS text editors for the fact that they are easy on the eyes.  An older GUI word processor I've tried had the option to type white letters on dark blue which was nice, but they don't all seem to do that which is annoying.

[Tysilio]

Free everything is best!  In the past year or so I've scored a weed trimmer, power washer, fancy brass 'n glass fireplace doors, an oak mantel shelf, storage bins including a fancy-ass Rubbermaid outdoor cupboard... I can't even remember it all.

It's pretty sad that so many people throw away and replace things when all they need is the tiniest of repairs -- if that. But I'm happy to take advantage of it.

Fun fact: It is very very difficult to accidentally delete what you've just written when you're using a typewriter.

This is true, but I am a convert to computers, mainly because editing and proofreading are so easy. How well I remember staying up for three days straight typing the final copy of my senior thesis on a Smith-Corona electric...  even white-out was frowned upon.

And  if you're editing a manuscript written by someone in France... electrons are the only way to fly.

[Lady Smith]

Yes it was the ease of editing and error correcting that finally weaned me away from using typewriters Tysilio 

When I started using an old IBM XT 8088 for writing I called it my 'intelligent typewriter'.  At one stage I owned an IBM clone 'lugable' which was the precursor of the modern laptop.  It was portable since everything, - keyboard, monitor, CPU and printer, - was built into the thing and it did have a carry handle on it, BUT it was very heavy and I certainly wouldn't want to have to 'lug' it very far.  My kids loved the thing and well after I stopped using it myself they would ask me if they could use it whenever they came to visit.  Just recently I sold it to a chap who was starting up a computer museum and he was very glad to get it too.

[Dena]

I missed out on the mainframe terminal experience Tysilio, but my computer tech daughter knows all about them. 

If your are talking IBM 360/370, I have one of them running on my system and the software is free. I am not sure what you were using for a word processor because we always used Xedit under VM which really lacks much in the way of formatting.

Prime had a pretty good word processor as they used it to produce their user manuals but the software was locked up so tight for that I can't get the emulator for that or I would have one.

As I am running Macs, I just use quick and dirty text edit and if I need special formatting, I import it into Pagestream which is a powerful publishing layout program.

I am not much of a writer but I did the condo new letter for a long time and that was what worked for me.