Bob,Early versions of Word (1.1, 2, 3) had issues with memory management. They could become unstable if the session was lengthy or the file large. I think Word became gradually better (more stable and easier to use) with each new version up to 5 - 5.5 and still retained the original benefits. You could use even Word 5.0 when you disable the Summary sheet option. Summary sheets in Word 4 and 5 do not understand Y2K dates. Word 5 crashes if Summary sheets are used. Word 4 complains about 'Not a valid date' but does not crash. Word 3 has no Y2K issues, and it has the 'Alpha' command if you want to retain the original menu structure. I have different versions of Word installed in my Virtual PC 2007. The memory footprint changes from 189 KB (Word 3.1) to 397 KB (Word 5.0) of used memory. XyWrite 4 consumes only 119 KB. All figures at startup without a loaded file. Nano is a nice Linux editor. Personally, I use EditPad to edit my remote Linux server files via FireFTP (a classic Firefox add-on).
Best regards, Kari Eveli LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland) lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx *** Lexitec Online *** Lexitec in English: https://www.lexitec.fi/english.html Lexitec English and Finnish dictionaries: https://sk.lexitec.fi/en/ Home page in Finnish: https://www.lexitec.fi/
Sorry for the delayed reply Kari; I was referring to Word 1.1 for DOS. It was amazing for its time and still is at least as a distraction-free word processor. Returning to Word 1.1 for DOS, I would use it more often for composing pure text, except for what I mentioned --- that DOSBox really drains my laptop batteries. (Same issue with Xywrite unfortunately.) I have exclusively Linux systems and I've customized the Nano editor to serve the purpose of writing a quick blog column or short fiction.