Free, or at least cheap

A friend of mine needs to borrow a laptop for National Novel Writing Month, so I’ve been tracking stuff down to put on the old PowerBook 5300 that I got from Wegener Media… It’s very much a bare bones machine. 1 GB hard drive, 32 MB of RAM and a little PowerPC 603e processor chugging away at 100 mhz… Not exactly the world’s speediest machine anymore, but it’ll work for word processing, and it’s been tricked out with external monitor support and ethernet…

I did some quick poking around to find some low-requirement programs for it and I found that Nisus offers free versions of Nisus Writer 4 and the tiny Nisus Compact word processor. Additionally, this thing is running MacOS 8.6, which means that it’s OpenDoc compatible…

I can sense people’s eyes glazing over as I’m writing… I know that this sort of stuff probably means nothing to most people, but sometimes I’ve just got to geek out.

OpenDoc was a nifty bit of technology that Apple came up with. Basically, instead of running a single monolithic application to create and edit a document, you’d create a generic document that you could edit with any of hundreds of little applications. It was a great concept that got killed off by poor marketing… MacKiDo has the whole sorry tale, if you’re interested.

Anyway, Apple wrote a cool OpenDoc application called “Cyberdog” which used some tiny network applications to go out and “fetch” information and put it into a document. Including web pages. In some ways, it’s the precursor to Apple’s Safari web browser. And it’s tiny! Open and running, it takes less than 3 MB of memory. Granted, iCab is smaller and can handle things like style sheets and such, but Cyberdog is more “retro” and thus possesses more cool.