It's office cleaning time, and I'm purging the shelves and filing cabinets and storage boxes of stuff I'll never use again. Today I ran across a couple of boxes of ancient software -- no, not 5 1/4" floppies, those I got rid of some years ago -- but a lot on 3 1/2" floppies and CDs.
I found several versions of DOS, Windows 95 and 98, memory managers like QEMM and RamDoubler, all sorts of defunct utilities, etc. XyWrite, Word Perfect 5.1, ECCO, ProCom Plus, Central Point PC Tools.... Ten-year-old versions of Norton Utilities and Norton AV. Yikes!
It got me thinking about all that lost code, and the tens of thousands of person-hours that went into creating it. It's too bad it just falls by the wayside. It would be great if a lot of the old programs were open sourced, so the code could be studied and used in other initiatives. I loved a lot of those programs in their day!
I tossed most of it, just keeping a few editions of DOS and early Windows for nostalgia purposes. I also kept an ancient oddity of a DTP program called PFS First Publisher, because I ran across a backup disk of newsletters in PFS format that I used to write for a running club I belonged to when I lived in Japan. Dunno if I can even install it on any of the machines I have now...
Posted by Paul at June 1, 2008 09:33 PM