It's gonna be interesting to see how well old USB ports will be supported in the long term with everyone rushing for thin machines with USB-C (sure you could buy a hub).

Back in 2000 my first laptop had a serial port and i bought a Wacom serial based tablet for it. A couple of years later that was gone and i had to buy a USB Wacom (that still works with win10 on modern machines!!). So for some other HW project i had to find a USB-Serial converter, so the question will be, are we really supporting the same old standards if we're forced to chase dongles?

Meanwhile, on a system from the 80s, you wouldn't have a word processor, you wouldn't have support for any of the filesystems supported by modern OSes (well, maybe FAT?), and you wouldn't have USB anyway. Heck, you'd need either a serial port or a floppy drive on a modern computer in order to even have a chance of transferring data between them.

You wouldn't have a word processor? There's lots of word processors for CP/M, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari, Tandy TRS-80, Tandy CoCo, not to mention proprietary machines like the Tandy 100/102/200 portables. A USB-Serial adapter works just fine. Or you can get a bluetooth or wifi modem that connects your old machine to the net.

Where do you propose to get a copy of WordStar in 2020, pray tell?

Umm...just download it? https://winworldpc.com/product/wordstar/ Sure you need to transfer the files over, but that's quick work with a cheap serial to USB adapter or a USB floppy drive if the target machine has 3.5" drive

For all those classic vintage computers there is someone selling a flash drive or similar mod that mimics a SCSI hard drive or floppy drive, etc.

You could hook up a Mac to the internet in 1985-ish, transferring files using telnet.

Mac OS still ships with BinHex (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BinHex), I think, so for Macs, that might already be the simplest way to exchange data between an early Mac and a modern machine (even if you have a floppy drive, does it read Mac disks?)

Edit: maybe my memory is of, and it was direct dial-up to another machine, not across the internet. NCSA Telnet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Telnet) supported TCP/IP before the OS did (yes, that was possible. I don’t know whether you still could do that on a modern system), though, so who knows?

> supported TCP/IP before the OS did (yes, that was possible. I don’t know whether you still could do that on a modern system), though, so who knows?

In general you can. If the OS lets you open raw sockets, you can implement TCP and all yourself in userspace. Although in those days, I'm guessing it was actually implementing the entire AT modem stack too, and just driving the modem directly via a serial port.

> You could hook up a Mac to the internet in 1985-ish, transferring files using telnet.

I'm sure you could. In 1985-ish.

How much of the required hardware still exists? How much of the required software can you find? Is that software (or another version of it) also compatible with your modern computer? etc.

wordstar released in '78 and was insanely popular until the 90s when ms-word mostly took over.

Also WordPerfect for DOS! We had an old XT that was "my" computer, and I did a lot of homework on it. Pretty sure it was WP5.1, which would have come out in '89, which matches the timeline pretty well (I think we got that computer around '92 or so).

And these days no one would have the slightest clue how to use it if they could even find it.

And Xywrite in between. It was great (and still is).