While reading The Apple II Age, I looked into some of the software produced and have a strong hankering for a simpler day of computing. Specifically Bank Street Writer speaks to me with it's simplicity of only putting text on a screen, knowing that you couldn't do anything but put text on the screen.
I'm just old enough to remember the floppy disk dance when I installed new software. Waiting for a few hours while some game installed was part of my computing life in the 386 days. Going back a bit further, I remember putting cassette tapes in our Commodore 64 to play games. At that point in my life I wasn't "into" computers, I was into games so that's all I did. It wasn't until the mid-90s that I got into programming by building my first Geocities site.
Yes there are rose coloured glasses involved in the simpler mono-tasking days of computing. Even my lowest powered device in the house can easily write text, and play some music, while still making the internet available to me with a quick switch.
Maybe it's time to setup a computer boots directly into a text editor and saves files out to a cloud provider but otherwise has no UI for me to use doing other stuff that's not writing?
Of course that also means I should put my phone, iPad, Steamdeck, and various other distractions out of reach at the same time so I don't waste the focused time I'm trying to give myself.
Do you have nostalgia for any era of computing? For a simpler time where people couldn't get in touch with you any time they wanted to. What's stopping you from making that happen today?