abandonware empires

⁨1736⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fossilesque@mander.xyz⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/379c1278-3545-4255-a014-b4fb4187881b.jpeg

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

Zehzin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Critical government services running entirely on COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes.

source
- TheLameSauce@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There is genuine money to be made in learning the “dead languages” of the IT world. If you’re the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
  
  I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
  
  source
  - cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’ve seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it’s not worth it.
    
    Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you’ll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that’s a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
    
    I’d honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it’s still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is one of those fantasies people have. You might as well hope to win the lottery.
    
    Imagine being the only person who can play a extremely custom instrument. Unless someone absolutely needs you, you’ll be sitting and hoping to get a job. Worse, a company is more likely to hire some people to rebuild it rather than hope to find this unicorn who can do this.
    
    Source: Been in the industry for 15yrs. I’m one of those guys you hire to migrate old software to a web app. And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How about a little casual graming on the side?
    
    source
- Treczoks@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just have a look at the American pension system. They collect all their documents on paper in an old salt mine. Truckloads of documents per month.
  
  source
- SupraMario@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There is some logic to running older stuff, a lot of it is a closed system and it’s harder for threats to target it. Banks are a big one that still run a ton of our financial infrastructure on COBOL.
  
  Hospitals also run on a ton of abandon ware, same with machine shops. Ultrasound machines that are still running 95 because for the hospital to upgrade to windows 7 or 10 is millions for a few machines. So you just airgap the systems for security.
  
  source
  - PrincessLeiasCat@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Credit to them for not wanting to move to 98 either.
    
    source
- mayoi@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Magnetic tapes aren’t that surprising, it’s just even more cost effective storage than HDD.
  
  source
sj_zero ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Originally copyright was like 15 years and if the thing was really good for you then you could Apply for a second 15 year term.

30 years is a long time to get a monopoly over something. As a human being, 30 years is a significant part of your entire lifetime. From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives. They're retiring, some who smoked or did other things are dying of old people diseases.

I believe strongly enough that 15 years is a reasonable copyright term that my book, the graysonian ethic, which I published in 2021, has a note on the legal page releasing it to the public domain 15 years from the first date of publishing, and in jurisdictions where you can't do that, it's licensed under the creative Commons zero license

If I want to own the rights to another book, I can write another book. If I can't make back the money that I spent writing and publishing it in 15 years, then that's a me problem, not a society problem the police can help enforce.

The famous song Happy Birthday left copyright only a couple years ago, and not because it timed out. The song which was written in the era of my great grandparents only lost protection from the largest state in history because after a hundred years no one could keep track of who owned it anymore.
- nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives
  
  Oh, don’t hurt me like that, please…
  
  source
- Clbull@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Honestly, the only silver lining of Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney over anti-gay legislation is that the Republicans might end up undoing all the copyright extensions Disney lobbied for over the past few decades.
  
  Disney is largely to blame for America’s copyright laws being so fucked.
  
  source
  - sj_zero ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Honestly, the less special treatment any one corporation gets, or the less special treatment corporations as a whole get, that's a win for everyone else in society.
    
    Most people on both sides of the aisle if you stepped away from the specific political situation would agree that companies should not be allowed to form their own municipal governments, either.
- Caboose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think part of the problem is that it is very dependent on what the invention is. Yeah, for some nicknack, that’s a reasonable time frame. But for some kind of massive project, where distribution, complicated supply chains, and many people are involved, this time gets eaten up quick. Imagine you have an invention, thats totally cool, but 10 years of your time is taken up trying to make it at scale to make it profitable? Meanwhile, someone else can establish all those things without breaking patent, and go to market as your patent closes. You aren’t wrong, its just not always so simple.
  
  source
  - sj_zero ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Copyright isn't patents. I think patents are presently 20 years, nowhere near the lifetime + 70 years of copyrights.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I work in an astrophysics department and this is exactly why we almost exclusively use open source software

source
- Amends1782@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Based
  
  source
  - ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This
    
    source
someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s a good read, read it.

source
- whodatdair@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  +1, do not regret
  
  source
CADmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.

source
- viking@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.
  
  source
  - purplemonkeymad@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Look for usb floppy emulators, you can have the floppy images in a usb flash drive. No moving parts or need to find expensive floppies.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - pyt0xic@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - grayman@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black a.co/d/hJwq736
    
    source
  - ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Almost 40 years, so it’s been running since the 80s? Damn, older than Windows.
    
    source
- hansl@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As long as it’s not connected to a network and is actually maintained, there’s nothing specifically wrong with Windows 98. Also just make sure the USB ports are shut.
  
  source
- WashedOver@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s amazing even for the cheaper CnC machines in other industries running on Dos or Win95, 98, XP. I use to have to maintain the hardware of these older PCs as the initial outlay to replace the machines was fairly high compared to stress and much lower cost of finding old hardware.
  
  In the end with the modem equivalent CnC machines on the lower end we would only see minimal upgrades to the functions of the machines, versus the updates to the software. Let’s me honest that would become obsolete yet again within a few years.
  
  It’s the circle of life?
  
  source
- psud@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My work used to use (until a project I worked on* to bypass it) a document formatter that lived in a set of chips on an ISA card
  
  ISA slots went rare with Pentium 1/586; were extinct not much later
  
  We had a beige box and a backup. When parts failed the replacements were incredibly expensive (enough it was worth 12*60 pdays of fixing)
  
  (* On resumes, I was totally critical to that project; in reality it was build led, and I was in design)
  
  source
noodle@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Games publishers are in a war of attention and don’t want to compete with themselves. They won’t sell you an old game if they can get you hooked on the new version with microtransactions and DLC with no story and sub-par multiplayer.

The next point is just making the case for open source.

source
- psud@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Some companies just make their new version compelling. You can’t get the experience of Balders Gate 3 by playing Balders Gate 1.
  
  I think they’re all competing with themselves anyway, the biggest customer group for Whatever 5 will be players of Whatever 4. Giving away Whatever 1, 2, and 3 will increase sales of 4 and 5
  
  source
Cowbee@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
IP shouldn’t exist in general.

source
- SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But then how would TCP and UDP work?
  
  source
  - spudwart@spudwart.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    simple. TCP wouldn’t, and UDP never did anyway.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - Cowbee@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Fair, lol
    
    source
  - ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Time to load up NetBIOS and… Stuff.
    
    source
- Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books…and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like ‘pay me for my brilliance’.
  
  source
  - Cowbee@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Absolutely. Free flow of information without pay wall allows humanity to collectively build upon itself.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - jadero@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, but it’s important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.
    
    source
- Wilzax@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Property other than what you personally use to live shouldn’t exist, but if we’re moving away from capitalism, IP is not first on the list of things to abandon
  
  source
  - frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Also, I could see some forms of IP being higher on the list than others. A market socialist setup, where every company is a worker owned co-op, would still have a lot of use for Trademarks. It could be a far less abusive system than the one we have now, but we’d still want it to exist.
    
    Market socialism itself is likely to only be a transitory step, though.
    
    source
  - Cowbee@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes.
    
    source
- psud@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A monopoly is thought to inspire creation, if that’s so IP is good, but should be on human timescales.
  
  100 years of monopoly won’t inspire me any better than 20 years, and even most cooperate products have less time in production than that
  
  source
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It’s used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.

source
- MxM111@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If you rely on free packages in Python for processing, those are as likely to become obsolete as anything else (if not more likely). I also really dislike the compatibility issues with different versions of different packages, the whole environment aspect. Buying new computer with different version of windows? Who knows what will work there.
  
  In this sense for scientific computation I prefer something like MATLAB. Code written 40 years ago, most likely would still work. New computer? No problem, no configuration, just install Matlab, and it runs! Yes, it cost money, but you get what you paid for.
  
  source
  - driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I mostly use pandas that I don’t think is going anywhere, we’re also going to start tests with a library called ‘chainladder’ that is used for some actuarial reserves calculations, from everything else I’m programming custom functions because as far as I know, there’s not a lot of actuarial mathematics libraries on Python (R have much more support for that, but I prefer the flexibility of Python, like a good portion of my job is scrapping our regulatory body website for information and not sure how good R work on that).
    
    source
  - alkheemist@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If you really don’t want to spend money, there’s always GNU Octave. Sure, it doesn’t have the thousands of matlab toolboxes, but if you’re running code from 40 years ago it shouldn’t need those anyway. I wrote a couple of scripts recently and then rewrote them slightly so that they would be compatible with octave.
    
    source
  - zaphod@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Matlab is ugly because it’s so backwards compatible. And it only is backwards compatible until someone decides to use it to interface with external hardware that you need a specific version of some library for.
    
    source
doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe

source
- BambiDiego@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Capitalism will always capitalism. “Oh, we have to provide a healthy option? Okay, it’ll be the expensive option.” “Oh, we have to support software? Okay, subscription models only” “Oh, we have to pay our workers minimum wage? Okay, we’ll pay them not a penny more and raise our prices”
  
  It’s an endless fight… Yet, we can’t stop fighting it, because attrition of our values and apathy in our actions are weapons the system uses against us.
  
  source
  - milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even books have the same. IIRC the ‘corrected’ version of Bilbo receiving the ring came into the Hobbit because the publisher wanted Tolkien to make a revised version to keep the copyright going.
    
    (I presume the corrected version of that chapter was just taking advantage of the opportunity, but still…)
    
    source
pyt0xic@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I work for a company who’s main source of income is a suite of accounting, stock and job management applications, all of which are written in FoxPro. The community add-ons and support is incredible but there hasn’t been any official support since like 2009.

Microsoft bought the license for FoxPro, supported it for a few years then killed it off when VB came out. I wonder why xD

The crazy part is some of our clients are turning over 100s of millions in profit a year, using this crappy, mess of a system written in a dead language, by one dude 😂

source
ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I love this post. How can you have the rights to something you don’t support?

source
- MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Intellectual property rights. They even wanted to extend it recently so they can milk old stuff.
  
  source
- WashedOver@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Perhaps it could be like copyrights and patents? If you don’t defend them, you lose them, and in some cases they expire after a set amount of time and then they can be used by others
  
  source
DpZer0126@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This post is so true. I work in local government in a state that has TONS of money, yet our systems to control the information for agents to determine if you keep your kids or not is still based on MS-DOS. it’s insane to see in 2023

source
- vardogor@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
  source
  - Saizaku@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Using something like DOS is neither preferred nor more safe. Last time MS DOS received a security patch was 23 years ago. It’s open to pretty much any security vulnerability you can think of. In case you depend on a DOS app it’s preferable to run it on a modern OS that is DOS compatible, windows 10 32bit for example (I believe Win11 still has support). Or even better sandboxed in an emulator like DOSBox on a more secure OS.
    
    source
  - Eccitaze@yiffit.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I really don’t want to rely on security through obscurity… MS-DOS was written back when every programmer trusted everything that ran on the computer, security wasn’t even an afterthought, and encryption was the sole domain of math nerds, conspiracy theorists, and the nerd equivalent of doomsday preppers because it was “too computationally expensive.” Its sole saving grace in terms of security is that it doesn’t support multitasking so malware can’t run in the background, but you can just target whatever software it’s running, instead.
    
    source
packadal@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Regarding “the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new”, I’ll invoke Hanlon’s razor.

I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.

They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.

And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.

Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it’s developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).

source
- Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yup somebody suggest that person VTK(open source) for the person in the post
  
  source
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I don’t know how we can’t legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just… throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it’s going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it’s just garbage.

source
- robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  how we can’t legislate
  
  because “we” don’t own our government, the parasites who profit from the thing you want to change have all the power. labor needs to organize, the alternatives are capitalists killing us all or the-doohickey
  
  source
- barrbaric@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The US (and all of their allies) are in favor of wealth redistribution to the ultra-wealthy, so predatory practices like this will never be stopped unless there is a sufficiently organized and pissed off mass movement calling for it. Researchers are a tiny group, so it won’t happen.
  
  source
AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
COBOL is still used heavily in banking, it would be the ultimate abandonware if it wasn’t still getting supported.

source
- psud@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s still supported because there’s billions of dollars moved by COBOL code and IBM and others want a share of the profit of those who move billions
  
  source
  - AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    True, but look at the documentation for IBM platforms and compare it to legacy documentation from Microsoft. People keep using it and part of it is because it has a lower maintenance cost than the short term costs of moving on. It’s not trust that exists in a vacuum, Microsoft has tried to sell too hard being a Microsoft developer using their Microsoft tools to ever have that legacy demand, companies will just use *nix instead.
    
    source
Bebo@literature.cafe ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
When Windows dropped support for XP, our NMR lab decided to change the OS of the PC linked to the NMR machine to Linux.

source
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Stallman was right.

source
Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I’d have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90’s or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.

So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.

source
- fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A rabbit hole, just for you:
  
  myabandonware.com
  
  abandonia.com
  
  gamesnostalgia.com
  
  archive.org/details/classicpcgames
  
  archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
  
  source
  - Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hey, thanks for the links! These got my childhood in them!
    
    source
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My bank started using Quickbooks file format if I want to download a transaction history, what a fucking nightmare. It’s not abandoned yet but nothing except the QuickBooks proprietary software seems to open them so far.

source
- Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  CSV isn’t nightmarish, it is just a table structure in text form. You can open it with any text editor.
  
  source
  - frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The problem is that it’s not really a standard. It’s reinvented ad-hoc by whomever programs it today.
    
    Should there be any whitespace after the comma? Do you want to use pipes or some other character instead of commas (ASCII 0x1E is sitting over there for exactly this purpose, but it’s been ignored for decades)? How do you handle escaping your separator char inside the dataset? Are you or or ? None of these questions have a set answer. Even JSON has more specification than this.
    
    source
- Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Csv are easy to open in any spreadsheet software. You can even copy/paste it straight into some of them, e.g. LibreOffice Calc
  
  source
  - Stretch2m@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Beware opening CSV in Excel. You will lose all your leading zeroes, among other “helpful” edits. Sometimes the leading zeroes are there for a reason!
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    OH BOY I LOVE OPENING A DATA DOCUMENT AND SPENDING THE NEXT HALF OUR FORMATTING IT MYSELF, TYSM
    
    source
xenu@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I'm not a programmer or anything, but I've heard decompilers have gotten better over the years.

source
- 4am@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
  
  That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
  
  source
  - wjrii@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I'm sure some do, but there's also a certain simplicity to "back up the Win95 machine" and "collect working Pentium 2's from eBay," particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I'm sure there's a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I've certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it's got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they'd be compatible with one.
    
    source
BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not just science, factory equipment that needs ancient computers to function too.

source
AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Many years ago, I worked for a software company that included code escrow for our customers. If something happened to is, they could unlock the code and support it themselves.

It can be done, but probably only is in industries with strong companies for customers

source
super_user_do@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Gotta save this one

source
TheCaconym@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.

source
crackajack@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Devil’s advocate: old games don’t have great quality of life improvements that we take for granted today and having remakes could fix the issues.

I played Civilizations 3 again and even though the graphics still hold up quite well by today’s standards, the UI doesn’t hold a candle to the later releases. Suffice to say, I won’t be playing Civ 3 again despite having grown up with the game. Old games like Civ 3 requires you to have like OCD and be extremely patient, which is something you can’t really have as an adult with less time to play videogames. There are old games that would retouching-- without the baggage of parasitic modern trends of course like DLshit and microtransactions.

source
hardaysknight@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Kinda off topic but he should just convert those Windows 95 computers to a virtual machine

source
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Alright I know this is going to get some hate and I fully support emulation but the justmeremember's supportive post is just bad. This is the same bad practice that many organizations, especially manufacturing, have problems with. If the ~20 years of raw data is so important, then why is it sitting on decades passed end-of-life stuff?

If it is worth the investment, then why not invest in a way to convert the data into something less dependent on EOL software? There's lots of ways, cheap and not to do this.

But even worse, I bet there 'raw' data that's only a year old still sitting on those machines. I don't know if the 'lab guy' actually pulls a salary or not but maybe hire someone to begin trying to actually solve the problem instead of maintaining an eventual losing game?

In ~20 years they couldn't be cutting slivers from the budget to eventually invest in something that would perhaps 'reset the clock?'

At this point I wouldn't be surprised to find a post of them complaining about Excel being too slow and unstable because they've been using it as a database for ~20 years worth of data at this point either.

source
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Its incredibly wasteful, but there is another perspective.

When that microscope was purchased, it formed part of someone’s budget throughout its service life. Support would have been guaranteed for that service life, but that life has now expired.

The company isn’t obligated to assist buyers beyond that service life, and doing so would eat into current and future profits.

There is not a single commenter (nor downvoter) in this thread who would open the source for that microscope if they owned that microscope company.

source
redballooon@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder what kind of lab that is.

source