years ago i bought a little computer on ebay including a bunch of disks of "Office Pack 2.0", which is nothing less than

Star Office 2.0

from 1993 (i.e. the grandgrandgrandfather of libreoffice and openoffice). the computer was also from 1993 and more or less unusable except as a disk drive emulator for my atari800xl ;) ...

to preserve the programm for the rest of the world, I decided to copy the floppies to images, but never used it and forget about them.

today i was thinking (just for fun purpose) if i could use this tiny but powerfull office siute on a modern computer.

i chose not to install it on dosbox, but direct on my dualcore windoze pc.. . but what if this modern kind of pc does not have a disk drive to insert disks? the solution is a little tool called VFD - virtual floppy drive. the installation of VFD is simple and so i installed star office 2 in less then 1 minute.

a first check was perfect. its unbvelievable fast (yes modern computers are 1000 times faster than in 93 )
but what is a office suite worth w/o printer? the suite only supports a bunch of really old printers and they have to be connected to your pc ... no networking back then :(

so i installed a HP postscript printer driver, which is still a popular printer protocol. and the program allows to output to a file, which can be opened (& printed) with the unique UI and program "gsview" and "ghostscript"...

bingo!
fast, powerful office suite on modern systems, with less then 4 MB (!)

your retro webdoktor

p.s. contact me to get a copy of staroffice2 ;)

StarWriter compact 2.0


p.s. also in this package were StarDraw 2.0 and StarBase 2.0

If you need images of the Floppies, use the contact link pleaase