Well, we networked all the computers together around that time, and it turned out that all the 1337 performance hacking that people did back then had severe unintended consequences. You’re talking about an era in which the NX bit would not be utilized by Windows for another ~7 years. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was contemporary work.
It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.
Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.
But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.
It’s not rocket science to eke out oodles of performance out of a potato if you don’t care about correctness or memory safety.
Word 97 will only delight you if you use it on an airgapped computer, as a glorified typewriter, never open anyone else’s documents with it, and are diligent about manually saving the doc to multiple places for when it inevitably self-corrupts.
But at that point, why not be like GRRM and write on a DOS word processor? Those were historically a lot more reliable than these second-generation GUI apps.