It was slow then. It's not now, not on even a decade-old PC.
But TBH, the text mode just works, and you can readily tweak DOS on a modern SVGA screen to display 132*50 text or something like that.
I know I'm a heretic for saying it, but I still like MS Word for DOS. It even shows me bold, underline and italics right there on the text screen, rather than making me guess colours like WordPerfect always did.
