Is There Any Reason To Keep Old Software?
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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.
Ah, Turbo everything. Back when I had more money than time, I bought everything Borland came up with. Aside from Pascal I never got further than the equivalent of Hello World with most of it. I should have spent the money on Microsoft stock. I may still have the box that Paradox came in. It was just the right size for an early IoT prototype.
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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.
That's easy. If you want it in C here it is, day of the week from day, month year:
int dow (int y, int m, int d)
{
static char const t[] = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4};
y -= m < 3;
return (y + y/4 - y/100 + y/400 + t[m-1] + d) % 7;
}I know I'm not supposed to post code in the lounge but it's for a good cause :laugh:
Mircea
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That's easy. If you want it in C here it is, day of the week from day, month year:
int dow (int y, int m, int d)
{
static char const t[] = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4};
y -= m < 3;
return (y + y/4 - y/100 + y/400 + t[m-1] + d) % 7;
}I know I'm not supposed to post code in the lounge but it's for a good cause :laugh:
Mircea
:) Thanks! But I got it all in one single line of Turbo Pascal code. That's what I wanted to replicate, just because. :)
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:) Thanks! But I got it all in one single line of Turbo Pascal code. That's what I wanted to replicate, just because. :)
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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:
Provided that you've got 230VAC available in your post-apocalyptic world. And replacement keyboards when the old one starts failing due to dirt. And your screen fails, but none of your spare ones can take the VGA signals from your old XP computer. And still usable ink for you ink jet printer. And ... There is a completely different problem: When your network connection fails - and in a post-apocalyptic world, it will - what are you going to use your PC for? No Google, no FaceBook or Twitter, no music or video streaming for entertainment, no weather forecast service, no whatever. You can of course use the PC to write down you private thoughts (but without a working printer, you can't distribute them to others) and a spreadsheet for keeping track of your supplies. Maybe a pencil and a few sheets of paper is good enough for such tasks.
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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.
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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.
dandy72 wrote:
I don't really see myself playing Wing Commander on modern hardware...
If you know how to slow down virtual hardware in a VM you can really play as old games as that or even more. Someone I know manage to get a win 98 working just to play some really old games.
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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My old DOS based TurboProlog doesn't work on Win11.
Pretty sure you can spin up a Win 95 in a VM on Windows 11. Win 95 ran on MS/PC-DOS (it was shell on top) so that instance would have it. And, if I recall correctly from somewhere (either this site or a story in the newsletter) you can run Win 95 without a license now.
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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!
haughtonomous wrote:
first cost to be stripped away by software houses was the quality documentation created by the skilled technical authors,
So back in the good ol' days it was better right? When exactly was that? What year? I remember using a library in the 90s (probably latter half.) Best documentation I had ever seen. That one library. Obviously I had seen other libraries, quite a few, which had miserable documentation. So certainly those did not have those great authors. In the 80s I learned C++ and OO programming from 3 books. One wasn't even for C++. The C++ compilers, at least two or perhaps three, that I used had virtually no documentation. One of the C++ compilers deliberately did not even match what Stroustrup (one of the books) documented and creator of C++. That 'feature' was not in any of the documentation. In the 70s the only programming book at all of any sort available to me for Fortran and Pascal were manuals that were chained to an operations desk. Those were not learning tools at all. Just a listing of methods and parameters for each. (In another post today I figured that one of those manuals, in current dollars would have cost about $1000 to buy.) Today I can probably buy 50 real books, on paper, that cover C++ in various forms. I can buy at least 10 books, again on paper, that cover Object Oriented Cobol. To me it certainly seems like there is no lack of documentation now versus way back when.
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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.
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Provided that you've got 230VAC available in your post-apocalyptic world. And replacement keyboards when the old one starts failing due to dirt. And your screen fails, but none of your spare ones can take the VGA signals from your old XP computer. And still usable ink for you ink jet printer. And ... There is a completely different problem: When your network connection fails - and in a post-apocalyptic world, it will - what are you going to use your PC for? No Google, no FaceBook or Twitter, no music or video streaming for entertainment, no weather forecast service, no whatever. You can of course use the PC to write down you private thoughts (but without a working printer, you can't distribute them to others) and a spreadsheet for keeping track of your supplies. Maybe a pencil and a few sheets of paper is good enough for such tasks.
trønderen wrote:
Provided that you've got 230VAC available
Amazing what solar cells are doing these days. I saw an add for an electric mountain bike which comes with an optional solar cells which can do a full charge in a day. Pretty sure that will run the PC for a while. My next door neighbor uses them to charge up his camper.
trønderen wrote:
And replacement keyboards when the old one...
Just saying it beats the alternative of fantasizing about dirt farming using a stick.
trønderen wrote:
what are you going to use your PC for?
Entertain the kids. Encyclopedia (we are talking about old software which used to exist like that on CD/DVD.) Use Excel (not 365) to track the output of your slaves in the fields.
trønderen wrote:
Maybe a pencil and a few sheets of paper is good enough for such tasks.
Except of course those run out also. Although with the Encyclopedia you can probably figure out how to make them.
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We recently had a member share their blog with us that contained a lot of entries about old software and hardware. Revisiting Borland Turbo C/C++, A Great IDE back in the 90s[^] It was a good reminder that some people (for whatever reason) have to use legacy code or systems and this developer's blog is dedicated to those people. If you're going to keep old things, I can see having this level of dedication and reaching that tiny niche of people who need it would be valuable. Otherwise ... My father was a pack rat. One day I looked in his closest and found books on things like Excel 3.0. I cannot imagine someone needing that book ever again. And it wasn't just books. It was hardware, software, other manuals, and empty boxes that contained hardware and software. When he died, it was difficult to explain to my Mom that none of this junk was ever going to help anyone, and the amount of effort it would take to find those people, ultimately, would not be worth it. You couldn't even put these items in a museum, because no such museum exists. The things you own end up owning you, and when you're gone, your loved ones. Those that would benefit from these relics are highly specialized and don't need your help. And because they won't live forever, the systems that these unicorns maintain will be replaced for any number of reasons. Burn it all.
Thanks, Sean Ewington CodeProject
Sean Ewington wrote:
One day I looked in his closest and found books on things like Excel 3.0. I cannot imagine someone needing that book ever again
And yet Amazon is apparently selling at least one book on that. "First Look at ... Microsoft Excel 3.0 for Windows" https://www.amazon.com/First-Look-Microsoft-Excel-Windows/dp/0070575940[^]
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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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Thanks! Been there before. Got the distributable but not the source code.
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Bruce Patin wrote:
I threw the IBM Selectric away
Why didn't you let him tear it apart? At least under the suggestion that he try to fix it himself?
I think I did suggest that, but he wasn't interested.