I've long considered getting a netbook, slapping freedos on it and running WordStar or WordPerfect as a writing deck.

I'm not sure how I would get my files I create off the device since USB support isn't really a thing.

If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.

I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.

I thought freedos could use usb? Get something with built in ethernet or serial and you can transfer that way pretty easy too.

Or just run joe as jstar and close enough, maybe? I use joe for mostly everything, but I never used WordStar (well, I ran into it once)

I've had similar thoughts and ended up going with FreeBSD and no network connection for my use case. It's been great. It gives you some of the expected terminal ergonomics (and USB support) without the distractions.

It should run fine under dosemu with a minimal console only Linux.

Apparently the right combination of BIOS and FreeDOS gives you somewhat easy USB support: https://superuser.com/questions/740474/how-to-access-a-usb-s...

Something like the Pocket 386 but with a regular size keyboard could be the perfect device for this purpose.

If you want just load the dos net ios/smb stack (or a tcp stack) and go to town.

Hyperbola GNU/Linux and Wordgrinder or jstar (from the Joe package) and Markdown, or even Groff as the basic syntax can be easy enough. Then you run

     groff file.troff -step -k  > file.pdf 

If any, check Groff with Mom macros, with does what you need with ease:

https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/

Online manual:

https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/toc.html

For a quick command:

     pdfmom -step -k yourfile.troff > output.pdf

- Install groff in Hyperbola GNU/Linux (or any other) if is not installed. It's mandatory in a 99% of distros but not Hyperbola.

- get https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-2.6_d.tar.gz

- uncompress it

- copy om.tmac to /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/om.tmac

- cd to examples/ directory and do some tests:

             pdfmom -step -k mom-pdf.mom  > mom-pdf.pdf

USB floppy drive on the modern computer side. I do this for old machines.

CF card. Pop the card out, read it on the PC.