Its wild to me to think of how much old computers could do relative to new. WordPerfect for DOS was always responsive and quick wheb I used it. I've seen ms word cludge up machines that should have plenty of power to run a word processor.
OMG yes please. :-)
Yep, WP for DOS was quick. Rather clunky UI compared to MS Word for DOS, IMHO, but fast. A friend of mine used a simple method to demo its speed: on his cheap monochrome 286 home computer, he loaded the book he was working on -- one big file, a few hundred pages -- and just held down the cursor key to scroll through the whole thing. It kept the entire doc in RAM and the text just blurred as it zoomed through the entire book in under a minute.
Compared then (early 1990s) to Windows where a similar text took tens of minutes, as my faster computer struggled to load in pages of text from disk, render the fonts, etc.
In the late 1980s, Amstrad introduced new CP/M machines, the PCW range:
https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PCW
They sold for over a decade and shifted about 8 million units. A CP/M computer, in the early Windows era.
Maybe it's time to do that again: a very low-spec machine, but with a crisp e-ink screen and a great premium-grade mechanical keyboard, shipping with a modern FOSS DOS, a compilation of free DOS apps, and some nice friendly graphical launcher. Wrapped up as an easy appliance that doesn't do Internet stuff at all, but makes it trivially easy to save your work on USB media or zap it to modern devices wirelessly.
Form factor of a big late-20th-century laptop, with a massive battery so it can double as a power bank for your phone or something.
I attached a couple of big SCSI drives and ran Windows NT 3.51 Server on it. When not logged in, it only used a couple of megs of RAM for the OS so file serving performance was tolerable -- and the hardware was literally bulletproof. I dropped one down a flight of stairs in my first job. The computer survived but it knocked lumps out of the concrete stairs on the way down.
A 386 with 4MB was the bare minimum to run Windows 3.11, which is considered the first mainstream GUI for PCs. Technically they required 3 MB, but recommended 4 MB.
Topping it all off, you're being disingenuous by suggesting running OS/2 desktop applications with just 4 MB of RAM. OS/2 was _notoriously_ memory hungry. At the very least it required more RAM than Win 3.11 (which recommended 4 MB). While OS/2 required 4 MB, suggested 8 MB as a minimum, but really needed 16 MB to do anything remotely useful.
And for you to not remember that is pretty telling.