Is There Any Reason To Keep Old Software?
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I have mountains of stuff, lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs, along with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal. Many years ago, when it was impossible to afford any MS product on a normal income, a member here generously sent me a version of VS that I could never otherwise purchase, and got me up and running again. I would hate to throw this stuff away and later learn that there was someone here who could really use it, either to learn, or to support an older product. But I have no idea how to find anyone who might need what I'm about to toss. Can someone make a suggestion? I'm sure there are others here in my same predicament.
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger Wright wrote:
with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal
Winning arguments? Such as 'I remember way back when when xxx had yyy and it worked a lot better then!'. And then 'Err...no...I just looked at my reference from 1996 and it did not have yyy...'
Roger Wright wrote:
lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs
Nostalgia? Antiques? My friend has every (boxes, manuals, etc) from every game system he has bought back to the 80s (or 70s). Sometimes that can end up being real money such as an original Apple computer (look up the price) Unusual utility? I worked at a company where a larger customer wanted us to upgrade an application that ran on thousands of install computers. Something like Windows 3.1 or 95. We (or they) had the original source code but at that time there was absolutely no access to the original tools used to build and work on the code. But I had saved all those CDs from Windows MSDN program. So I found the old IDE and we were able to provide a successful update for the customer. Other than that there are sites that sell miscellaneous stuff. You don't have to make money but if someone is will to pay at least the shipping then they presumably have some interest (perhaps one of the ones I mentioned above.)
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Somewhere around here, I think I still have Visual C++ 1.2. Or was it 1.4? I don't remember, but I still have the Scribble tutorial book that came with it. What a useless scrap of paper... When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation. I despise them for that, and always will. A light went out in the Universe when printed knowledge ceased to exist, and MS started it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger -- the honest answer you may be seeking is that you're hoarding junk. Sticking to an area I know, consider compilers, IDEs, associated software, and topical books. Relatively few people are using out-of-support software, and if they are, they already have what they need. If they don't, how are you going to find them? If you want to try, catalog part of the materials, and post on Facebook Marketplace -- there's a buy-it-for-free (can't recall what the name is). List lots of materials and give it away. If after a month, there's no takers, it's junk. Recycle books, CDs/DVDs go in the landfill (sadly). If you still have floppy disks? They fizzle after 10 years-ish, so they are probably not readable, assuming you can find someone with a working floppy drive. There are other online avenues to give things away, but FB has an active market, so it came to mind. Regarding your buried container -- why don't you unblock the entrance and let folks steal what they want? It saves you a lot of hassle, and it's doing what you want -- giving it to someone who wants it. About 15 years ago I went on a cleaning binge of computer junk. I had shelves of books, containers of CDs/DVDs, and boxes of old parts. In my binge I wiped out a quarter of the hoard, things I knew was never gonna be useful again. Probably only a quarter was actually useful, half was questionable, but it was a start. I do this every 2 or 3 years. It's taken numerous iterations, but the clutter is greatly reduced. Although I see I have C# 2008, ASP.NET v2, and WordPress v2 books on my shelf, so it's time to make another stab at it ...
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As soon as you discard it, you will need something in there. Someone's law also says that it will not be available anywhere else. I resurrected an old mothballed Dell server, running ESXi, to test Chris's AI and Blue Iris surveillance software. Put a W10 VM and a Linux VM for same. Been running for several months. Yesterday, iDRAC complained about a drive failure. All drives (10) are mirrored with a hardware RAID (5 mirrors). Only one is in use. Guess which one failed? :sigh: So, I VPN'd in to that LAN and tried to log into the iDRAC. Browsers wouldn't connect due to outdated SSL stuff. Went to my hidden cabinet-of-shame archive, copied and fired up an old W7 VM, logged in with IE, got the size of the hard drive that had failed, and ordered a replacement. All from 50 miles away. Hoping the survivor lasts until next week. I had come close to trashing the old drive containing the archive of VM's and assorted software. I just increased the size of the drives in my trueNAS system to avoid throwing anything away. Go ahead, trash stuff. Murphy is out there .............................................................waiting.
>64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
I had to search for a windows XP SP3 to make a VM for a relative because he was very good with an image editor from MS Office 2000 and he didn't feel like learning something a bit more contemporany.
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I had to search for a windows XP SP3 to make a VM for a relative because he was very good with an image editor from MS Office 2000 and he didn't feel like learning something a bit more contemporany.
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
Handy stuff. I still have a database application (Visual FoxPro) that I run in an XP VM. I installed Office 2K on a W10 system, telling it to ignore the error that came up during install. Outlook wouldn't run but everything else that I tried did.
>64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I have mountains of stuff, lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs, along with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal. Many years ago, when it was impossible to afford any MS product on a normal income, a member here generously sent me a version of VS that I could never otherwise purchase, and got me up and running again. I would hate to throw this stuff away and later learn that there was someone here who could really use it, either to learn, or to support an older product. But I have no idea how to find anyone who might need what I'm about to toss. Can someone make a suggestion? I'm sure there are others here in my same predicament.
Will Rogers never met me.
Biggest reason to keep old VS releases is that these still have tooling for otherwise supported, but not cool anymore MS technologies. Like SQL Compact, for example.
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Somewhere around here, I think I still have Visual C++ 1.2. Or was it 1.4? I don't remember, but I still have the Scribble tutorial book that came with it. What a useless scrap of paper... When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation. I despise them for that, and always will. A light went out in the Universe when printed knowledge ceased to exist, and MS started it.
Will Rogers never met me.
Couldn't have put it better myself. I used to hate the MS hierarchical online documentation tier upon tier of web pages that offered nothing useful other than more links to ever more such pages until one was completely lost. I used to yearn back to the days when I worked on Apollo Domain workstations that came with a stack of thick books that were stuffed with useful and in-depth detail that you could actually read and learn from!
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Biggest reason to keep old VS releases is that these still have tooling for otherwise supported, but not cool anymore MS technologies. Like SQL Compact, for example.
A number of times I've had to dig out one or other "obsolete" piece of software, IDE, tools, whatever, to either upgrade something to work on a more recent platform or fix a bug for a customer (paying for the service). So I wouldn't ditch anything just because it's "old". And never ditch books; knowledge is never useless, just needs the right context to come along!
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There is no such thing as cheap storage. This is physical product, not software images. I have an entire room that I cannot traverse on foot because of the piles of books, papers and CDs. Oh, and there's a few guns in there, too, along with a bunch of ammo. I have a 45' shipping container sitting in the middle of a 20 acre parcel of land filled to the brim with "stuff" that I can't even get to. I had to bury the doors with my tractor to keep the tweakers from breaking into it when I'm away. Now I have to hide my tractor to keep them from stealing it. In my back yard, I have a 10' x 10' shed full of containers of books - mostly computer related. This has got to end, but I don't want to trash anything any of my friends here can use. It's a quandry...
Will Rogers never met me.
Lose the guns and ammo. That will free up some space for non-lethal books and so on.
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Roger Wright wrote:
When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation.
Well, the first thing that happened was that the users stopped reading the documentation. Old memory: I was working in an office landscape then, and heard the guy in the cubicle across the walkway receive a phone call - he was a support guy for the Fortran compiler (it is that long ago!). Obviously I could hear only one side of the conversation- It went like this: Yes, what is your problem? I understand ... Do you have a Fortran manual at hand? Could you open it on page 147? Good. Will you read out to me the first paragraph on that page? Oh sure, that's what we are here for, to help you with your problems. Have a good day! The fun thing is that this support man never picked up his own Fortran manual to find the right page; he took it all from memory. So all companies stopped writing manuals, more or less. (Some environments never had any - I refuse to call *nix man pages 'technical manuals'). Those companies providing 'something' on paper should be ashamed for calling it 'documentation'. More than 30 years ago, I saved in my scrapbook a comic drawing of a totally broken down man, weeping at the psychiatrists desk. The psychiatrist tries to comfort him: "Having been diagnosed as a dyslectic doesn't mean that you have to give up a writing profession - you can still make a great career in computer documentation!" Practically speaking, no companies provide good documentation, and hasn't done so for several decades. If you ask for manuals, textbooks, tutorials, they say that they leave that kind of stuff to independent writers and publishing houses. But even those writers usually deliver mediocre quality. One part of it is the readers' expectations: I buy several books that have a very high rating and lots of recommendations on Amazon and other sites, and when I get the book, it proves to be a mess, poorly organized, terribly useless examples, extremely wordy with lots of unnecessary repetitions yet missing essential information, usually with a useless index (sometimes not updated from the previous edition, so the references are all wrong!) I never had the impression that MS documentation is (/was) any worse than the others. They are all that bad!
Technical authorship is a highly skilled job, one that developers are hopeless at (and unwilling to do anyway, if they can avoid it). The trouble is that it is the code that purchasers buy, so the first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors, replaced by rubbish "online" documentation provided by reluctant developers. There's a whole generation of users now who have never experienced anything else and know no different. No doubt some claim this is progress!
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Roger Wright wrote:
When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation.
Well, the first thing that happened was that the users stopped reading the documentation. Old memory: I was working in an office landscape then, and heard the guy in the cubicle across the walkway receive a phone call - he was a support guy for the Fortran compiler (it is that long ago!). Obviously I could hear only one side of the conversation- It went like this: Yes, what is your problem? I understand ... Do you have a Fortran manual at hand? Could you open it on page 147? Good. Will you read out to me the first paragraph on that page? Oh sure, that's what we are here for, to help you with your problems. Have a good day! The fun thing is that this support man never picked up his own Fortran manual to find the right page; he took it all from memory. So all companies stopped writing manuals, more or less. (Some environments never had any - I refuse to call *nix man pages 'technical manuals'). Those companies providing 'something' on paper should be ashamed for calling it 'documentation'. More than 30 years ago, I saved in my scrapbook a comic drawing of a totally broken down man, weeping at the psychiatrists desk. The psychiatrist tries to comfort him: "Having been diagnosed as a dyslectic doesn't mean that you have to give up a writing profession - you can still make a great career in computer documentation!" Practically speaking, no companies provide good documentation, and hasn't done so for several decades. If you ask for manuals, textbooks, tutorials, they say that they leave that kind of stuff to independent writers and publishing houses. But even those writers usually deliver mediocre quality. One part of it is the readers' expectations: I buy several books that have a very high rating and lots of recommendations on Amazon and other sites, and when I get the book, it proves to be a mess, poorly organized, terribly useless examples, extremely wordy with lots of unnecessary repetitions yet missing essential information, usually with a useless index (sometimes not updated from the previous edition, so the references are all wrong!) I never had the impression that MS documentation is (/was) any worse than the others. They are all that bad!
Technical authorship is a highly skilled job, one that developers are hopeless at (and unwilling to do anyway, if they can avoid it). The trouble is that it is the code that purchasers buy, so the first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors, replaced by rubbish "online" documentation provided by reluctant developers. There's a whole generation of users now who have never experienced anything else and know no different. No doubt some claim this is progress!
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I have mountains of stuff, lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs, along with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal. Many years ago, when it was impossible to afford any MS product on a normal income, a member here generously sent me a version of VS that I could never otherwise purchase, and got me up and running again. I would hate to throw this stuff away and later learn that there was someone here who could really use it, either to learn, or to support an older product. But I have no idea how to find anyone who might need what I'm about to toss. Can someone make a suggestion? I'm sure there are others here in my same predicament.
Will Rogers never met me.
Keep it. Maybe you will need after a post-apocalyptic future. And if you have a Windows XP computer, you will be the master of the world. :laugh:
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I see! Your problem is orders of magnitude larger than mine. :omg: For CD's I made them all ISO images and put them on a NAS. I have 16TB available so I could store a bit more than 20000 CD's and I've never had anywhere near that number. Floppies and zip disks (remember those?) had the same fate. Good thing I did it before my zip drive died. Most documents have also been scanned as well as some books that I was particularly attached to. If you make a list of what you have, count me among those interested. Good luck!
Mircea
Oh my goodness, hahaha, when I started college doing graphic design, if someone had a 1GB zip, they were considered rich... 🤣🤣🤣
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There is no such thing as cheap storage. This is physical product, not software images. I have an entire room that I cannot traverse on foot because of the piles of books, papers and CDs. Oh, and there's a few guns in there, too, along with a bunch of ammo. I have a 45' shipping container sitting in the middle of a 20 acre parcel of land filled to the brim with "stuff" that I can't even get to. I had to bury the doors with my tractor to keep the tweakers from breaking into it when I'm away. Now I have to hide my tractor to keep them from stealing it. In my back yard, I have a 10' x 10' shed full of containers of books - mostly computer related. This has got to end, but I don't want to trash anything any of my friends here can use. It's a quandry...
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger, here's what I would do... Imagine that you are going to move into a new house and the move is 1000+ miles away. You can pack a couple of pods or drive a rental truck and the new house is a typical 3/2 with a garage. Then play take it or leave it. Anything in the leave-it category can get divided into groups like dumpster, thrift store, and sell. Storage isn't cheap and moving it is even more expensive. I had stuff on 5-1/4 floppies a few years ago. I gave some to a coworker for wall decorations, recycled the boxes and books and trashed other stuff. I hadn't looked at them in a zillion years, I don't have any box with a 3-1/2 drive, no less 5-1/4. I have one with a DVD that hasn't been on for years and whatever valuables that are on it aren't worth anything. If you have time, look at Ebay and see if anything has any interest. Don't look at 'for sale', look at sold. In most cases, it isn't worth the cost (and hassle) of shipping. People will often take some of the stuff for free, and they'll do the same thing you're doing with it; put it on a shelf and never look at it again. Declutter!
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A number of times I've had to dig out one or other "obsolete" piece of software, IDE, tools, whatever, to either upgrade something to work on a more recent platform or fix a bug for a customer (paying for the service). So I wouldn't ditch anything just because it's "old". And never ditch books; knowledge is never useless, just needs the right context to come along!
When I moved to another state 8 years ago I did some additional clearing. I get a Facebook memories post around March 1st showing pictures of some old Novell Netware CNE and Microsoft MCSE study books (thick ones) from the 90's from publishers that no longer exist.
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For a long time, i had a Visual C++ installer CD, the 16-bit version. Must be still at home.
Me too, the VC++ IDE ver 6.0 holds a warm place in my little black heart
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Mircea Neacsu wrote:
If you make a list of what you have, count me among those interested. Good luck!
I'll put you on the list, Mircea. This won't be soon, but it's something I have to do! I wonder if my copy of ProLog for DOS will run on Windows 11? AI is starting to look big!
Will Rogers never met me.
My old DOS based TurboProlog doesn't work on Win11.
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I have mountains of stuff, lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs, along with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal. Many years ago, when it was impossible to afford any MS product on a normal income, a member here generously sent me a version of VS that I could never otherwise purchase, and got me up and running again. I would hate to throw this stuff away and later learn that there was someone here who could really use it, either to learn, or to support an older product. But I have no idea how to find anyone who might need what I'm about to toss. Can someone make a suggestion? I'm sure there are others here in my same predicament.
Will Rogers never met me.
Software? Sure, a few years ago I turned every CD and DVD that I still didn't have in ISO format yet into a file, and put them all on my NAS (multi-TB disks are cheap and only getting cheaper). Then I got rid of the physical media. There's exceptions (games and such that can't be converted because of copy protection), but this takes comparatively so little room I haven't bothered to do anything them. At one point I suspect I'll just get rid of 'em - I don't really see myself playing Wing Commander on modern hardware...and if I ever have to scratch that itch, I suspect there's an emulator out there. Physical stuff...the odds that someone is looking for something specific, and knows you're the one to contact, are so small it's not worth the physical space the stuff is taking. Years ago I had salvaged some brand new X-Window books (low-level GUI programming for Unix), still in their shrink-wrap - a whole shelf worth of them - from a company that went under...had them in a box for maybe a decade, but then I realized I would never make use of them, and the stuff by then was already so old it was never going to be useful to anyone (certainly not me). So that went for recycling, along with many OS/2 books (to give you an idea of how long ago that was)... As others have said - technology doesn't age well. I have no problem getting stuff digitized, no matter how arcane, but physical stuff is rarely useful. I wouldn't hang onto some piece of hardware as a potential replacement for something someone needs when theirs breaks (is it really your problem to solve?) Besides, replacing something broken with something that's just as old and has been sitting on a shelf for years is just kicking the can further down the road; that system, *if* it's actually useful, needs to be replaced.
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There is no such thing as cheap storage. This is physical product, not software images. I have an entire room that I cannot traverse on foot because of the piles of books, papers and CDs. Oh, and there's a few guns in there, too, along with a bunch of ammo. I have a 45' shipping container sitting in the middle of a 20 acre parcel of land filled to the brim with "stuff" that I can't even get to. I had to bury the doors with my tractor to keep the tweakers from breaking into it when I'm away. Now I have to hide my tractor to keep them from stealing it. In my back yard, I have a 10' x 10' shed full of containers of books - mostly computer related. This has got to end, but I don't want to trash anything any of my friends here can use. It's a quandry...
Will Rogers never met me.
Do you have a copy of BitFont source code? I wrote it and distributed it for a fee in the 1980s but lost the code on unreadable floppies. There is a line of code that I want: one line I wrote to get the day from the date in any year, taking into account leap years and maybe centuries.
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I have a saying. Nostalgia is a prison if you choose to live there. Thanksgiving (USA) week 2008 a fire started in a home two doors down from us. The fire damaged seven homes including the back half of mine. Turns out those fiberglass shower remodels are very flammable. My office shared a common wall with the bathroom and most of my computer documentation, books, magazines, and physical software was destroyed. I had been a bit of a hoarder regarding computer stuff. After the fire I ended up throwing away a lot of PC XT/AT clone boards and things that I salvaged from customer upgrades over the years. Basically, I started fresh moving forward. But there are some things that I really do wish I could find a dozen years after the fact. It’s almost all documentation and some software. I had user guides and service guides for older equipment that I have seen people ask in vintage computer forums. I had never digitized them and now can’t. This isn’t older versions of current items, but unique items when CP/M, Flex and OS/9 were popular, in the late 70’s and very early 80’s. There was a lot of history there. I had a collection of manuals from the late 80’s and 90’s for PC multi-function cards and motherboards. I see retro computer channels that could have used that information. The other stuff I really haven’t missed or really would have been able to do anything with today. One recuring thought I do have is that I had a Motorola/Hitachi 6809 based PC from Canon. Same Canon that makes cameras, copiers, calculators, etc. I would have liked to see if I could have gotten OS9 or Flex running on it. All I really need is the memory map of the computer to answer the question, but I haven’t found any documentation. I keep looking.
Rich Shealer
I bought my son an old IBM Selectric typewriter for $3 that was supposedly in working condition, but back home, the main shaft was frozen. I used to fix them, but forgot a lot of details, especially about timing, and could not find an IBM manual, even from IBM, that described how to service it, so after describing to my son how it was supposed to work, I threw the IBM Selectric away. The end.