The answer to that is simply, No...you just can't be. Just as you would not want to take a rickety and rusty old car onto the interstate you would not want to go back to the early format and software of computers. It just isn't going to cut it...but we will get into that later.Ideally professionals in the communications and technology businesses are here to make sure that users get their jobs done more efficiently. That means they need to be able to cover all of the bases when it comes to the basic needs of the end user.
When PC's first came our many of the functions that we take for granted today like video, email and Instant Messaging were either just beginning or didn't exist. Computers did simple things like replace typewriters with word processing and calculators with spreadsheets. Today, PCs are complete communication tools and users do multiple things at the same time.
The bare bone minimum things a computer has to do today include:
- Word Processing
- Spreadsheets
- Databases
- Web surfing
- Audio/video playback
- IM
That means you can probably rule out any of the 8 bit machines of the first microcomputer era. the first Apples and computers that came out in the 80's might be able to do a few of the things on the list, but they’re too antiquated to do much more than be tasked with simple single things. Even if you move into the early 16-bit PC era, anything DOS based is also pretty much useless today. Again, you might be able to use it to do half the things on the list, but that’s about it.
So as for software and machines between 1970's and early 1990's, the problem is that work and the expectations now are changed radically different. Users access multiple data formats with different applications running simultaneously. It would be torture to get anything done on a DOS machine today.
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