Classic PC Programs Still Do the Job

In the wake of the annual Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, with all its jazzy new software and hardware on display, it is easy to forget that computer obsolescence is more a state of mind than a reality.

I was reminded of this the other day when my neighbor told me that it was costing him about $100 to replace the broken main circuit board of his aging 80286-based PC clone computer. He replaced the old board with a new 80286 microprocessor board, reusing his old and meager 640 kilobytes of system memory.

Many people would say it wasn’t worth spending $10 to fix his 5-year-old machine.

My instinct would have been to slip in a new i486/66 megahertz board, along with eight or 16 megabytes of memory and several hundred megabytes of new hard disk storage. Then, of course, I would want to throw in a new high-resolution monitor and video board. Before I could blink an eye, the bill would be $2,000 or more.

For thousands of PC users, however, the lowly 80286 board loafing along at eight or 10 megahertz is just fine. They can’t run Windows programs, of course, but they still have the comparative speed and simplicity of DOS-only computing.

Consider all the software you can run on an old PC clone.

This column, for instance, was written with PC-Write Advanced Level 4.0 from QuickSoft Inc., Seattle (800) 888-8088. This $89 program is a powerful and flexible word processor and text editor that can be customized in countless ways to meet special text-formatting requirements.

It is fast, even on slow computers, and includes spell checking and a thesaurus. You won’t need a graphics monitor to do fancy text formatting, because the program’s page-preview mode only symbolizes what the page will look like, making fine-tuning on the screen difficult.

You can gain much greater power over documents with WordPerfect 5.1, from WordPerfect Corp., Orem, Utah, $495. This program also runs fine on 80286 and low-powered 80386 computers.

WordPerfect has a reputation for being difficult to learn, but once learned, its users are enthusiastic about its capabilities. A menu system can be called up to help if you can’t remember the keystrokes for a particular command.

Another classic PC program designed for older, slower computers is Lotus 1-2-3, currently at version 2.4 in its DOS form. Published by Lotus Development Corp., Cambridge, Mass., for $495, this is the spreadsheet that helped IBM’s PC become the world’s most imitated computer.

There are few spreadsheet tasks it cannot accomplish with ease. If you have a graphics monitor, you can do on-screen formatting with various type sizes and styles, just like the Windows spreadsheets.

If you’re among the legions still using the old, old 1-2-3, version 2.01, you can upgrade to the new version for $119 and enjoy many spreadsheet features without spending a dime to upgrade your old computer.

Database applications have always been strong on DOS-only PCs, with new Windows versions only now beginning to rival them.

Borland International of Scotts Valley, Calif., has a strong hold on that marketplace with its Paradox 4.0 and dBaseIV, version 1.5, an upgrade of a product it acquired when it bought Ashton-Tate last year. Both are priced at $795.

If you want to distribute stand-alone or networked database applications at minimal cost, Clarion Professional Developer 2.1 from Clarion Software Corp., Pompano Beach, Fla., is an application development package that creates stand-alone database programs you can distribute without paying any royalties. It is available for $195 to anyone using any type of software for data applications.

Computer File welcomes your comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters.