abandonware empires

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)

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 And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.

How about a little casual graming on the side?

Credit to them for not wanting to move to 98 either.

The good part about it is being more sustainable by using the same PCs for three decades.

Imagine banks, hospitals and so on regularly replacing their machines. That would be an ungodly amount of electronics

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.

Copyright isn't patents. I think patents are presently 20 years, nowhere near the lifetime + 70 years of copyrights.

This

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.

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...

GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black https://a.co/d/hJwq736

Almost 40 years, so it's been running since the 80s? Damn, older than Windows.

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).

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.

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.

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...)

simple. TCP wouldn't, and UDP never did anyway.

Fair, lol

Time to load up NetBIOS and... Stuff.

Absolutely. Free flow of information without pay wall allows humanity to collectively build upon itself.

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.

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.

Yes.

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.

Hey, thanks for the links! These got my childhood in them!

The rant in the post has some merit to it, but the thing it sort of misses is also the reason not to use VM. It works just fine. It hasn't been updated in 20 years because it still works. It does what it says on the box. Why put it in a VM? What would you gain from it? If you need Internet just grab a laptop and have it sit next to the main computer. That way users have a much smaller chance to break something vital. Pretty much all the control computers are air gapped anyway. No updates or anything to break things you reeeeally don't want to break.

The only case I've seen VMs being used is if the old computer breakes and you can't really find something that's compatible with old-as-fuck software om bare metal. I work in a cleanroom and we got sooo many systems that are windows 95 or older (DOS anyone?). Electron microscope, etching systems, probe stations

I had to reverse-engineer a floppy disk encryption scheme that was performed by some DOS software that directly talked to the IDE floppy controller. There's no emulating that. A USB floppy drive can't even be operated in the same way.

It was easier to just crack the (admittedly trivial) encryption.

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.

You can get PCIe to PCI cards. I think PCIe is pretty much backwards compatible with PCI and only little logic is required. And PCI-X cards do work in PCI slots at reduced bandwidth.

Tho, if a system works without issue, why touch it? Only if parts become hard or expensive to come by a replacement makes sense.

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 [CR] or [LF} or [CR] [LF]? None of these questions have a set answer. Even JSON has more specification than this.

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!

OH BOY I LOVE OPENING A DATA DOCUMENT AND SPENDING THE NEXT HALF HOUR FORMATTING IT MYSELF, TYSM

On the other hand, something like ReactOS could, in theory, work if it was much more mature and had more developers behind it.

Ah yeah, drivers are another thing entirely. Especially for what I imagine is very proprietary undocumented hardware. The only thing that can help there is a reverse engineer / kernel module dev.

I agree, I'm not saying companies should legally prevent consumers from playing old games. These games are twenty years old and companies should not try to squeeze every cent from the IP they have practically abandoned.

Obviously the company is the bad guy here. But if the research data is so important, the lab should try to solve their problem instead of just praying that the 20 year old machine won't fail.

I didn't say capitalism is perfect nor did I imply it.

So hypothetically let's say the vendor lost the rights to the software since it is abandonware -- great. I'd love it.

What changes for justmeremember's situation? Nothing changes.

I suppose your only issue here is that the software vendor or some entity should support it forever. OK, so why didn't they just choose a FOSS alternative or make one themselves? If not then, why not now? There is nothing that stops them from the latter other than time and effort. Even better, everyone else could benefit!

Does that make justmeremember just as culpable here or are they still the victim with no reasonable way to a solution?

I posted simply because this specific issue is much too common and also just as common is the failure to actually solve it regardless of the abandonware argument instead of stop-gapping and kicking it down the line until access to the data is gone forever.

Because it's often not worth the investment. You would pay a shit ton for a one time conversion of data that is still accessible.

Still accessible for now and less likely to be accessible as the clock ticks and less likely that there is compatible hardware to replace.

If it isn't worth the investment, then what's the problem here? So what if the data is lost? It obviously isn't worth it.

If the software became open source, because the company abandoned it, then that cost could potentially be brought down significantly.

OK but that isn't a counter point to what I said. If the hardware never fails, there is no problem either. What does that matter? And who cares if it was FOSS (though I am a FOSS advocate). What if nobody maintains it?

It doesn't matter because these aren't the reality of the problems that this person is dealing with. Why not make some FOSS that takes care of the issue and runs on something that isn't on borrowed time and can endure not only hardware changes but operating system changes? That'd be relevant. It goes back to my point doesn't it? Why not hire this person.

Clean room reverse engineering has case law precedent that essentially make this low risk legally (certainly nil if the right's holder is defunct).

You are also missing the parts where functional hardware loses support. Which is even worse in my opinion.

I didn't miss the point. I even made the point of having at least 20 years to plan for it in the budget. Also the hardware has already lost support or there wouldn't be an issue, would there? You could just keep sustaining it without relying on a diminishing supply.

Or are we talking about some hypothetical hardware that wasn't mentioned? I guess I would have missed that point since it was never made.

So again and again and again, I was not arguing against the abandonware issue. I take issue with how the problem is being stop-gapped in this current situation and not in some hypothetical alternate timeline.

Instruments like the ones we use are super expensive

Great. I didn't imply otherwise.

On top of that most people here barely understand computer and software

So the lab guy maintaining Windows 95 era computer's hardware, barely understands computers. Got it. I suppose this same lab guy won't be able to do anything even if the source code was available and would still being doing the same job.

What you’re suggesting is treating the symptoms but not the disease. Making certain file formats compatible with other programs is not an easy undertaking and certainly not for people without IT experience.

I didn't say it isn't. I said they've had 20 years to figure it out. What would source code being available solve for them then? We could assume other people would come together to maintain it, sure. I've also talked about other solutions in replies. There are even more solutions. I wasn't trying to cover all bases there. It is just that within a couple of decades this has been a problem, there has been plenty of time to solve it.

Software for tools this expensive should either be open source from the get-go or immediately open-sourced as soon as it’s abandoned or company goes bust

Oh OK, so that makes it less complicated. I thought the assumption here is that, in general, anyone in that lab barely understands a computer or how software works. So, who's going to maintain it? Hopefully, others, sure. I actually do talk about this in other replies and how it is something I support and that, in this case, the solution is to deliver the source with the product. FOSS is fantastic. Why can't that just be done now by these same interested parties? Or are we back to "can't computer" again? Then what good is the source code anyway?

But again, that's a "what-if things were different" which isn't what I was discussing. I was discussing this specific, real and fairly common issue of attempting to maintain EOL/EOSL hardware. It is a losing game and eventually, it just isn't going to work anymore.

Even with plenty of funding to workaround the issue that shouldn’t be necessary, it’s a waste of time and money just so a greedy company can make a few extra bucks.

Alright, the source code is available for this person. Let's just say that. What now?

What can be done right now, is fairly straight forward and there are numerous step-by-step guides. That's to virtualize the environment. There is also an option to use hardware passthru, if there is some unmentioned piece of equipment. This could be done with some old laptop or computer that you've probably tossed in the dumpster 10 years ago. The cost is likely just some labor. Perhaps that same lab guy can poke around or if they're at a university, have their department reach out to the Computer Science or other IT related teaching department and ask if there are any volunteers, even for undergrads. There are very likely students that would want to take it on, just because they want to figure it out and nothing else.

There may be an edge case where it won't work due to some embedded proprietary hardware but that's yet another hypothetical issue at stake which is to open source hardware. That's great. Who's going to make that work in a modern motherboard? The person that you've supposed can't do that because they barely understand a computer at all?

In this current reality, with the specific part of the post I am addressing, the solution currently of sustaining something ancient with diminishing supply is definitely not the answer. That is the point I was making. There is a potential of 20 years of labor hours. There is a potential of 20 years of portioning of budgets. And let's not forget, according to them, it is "CRITICAL" to their operations. Yet, it is maintained by a "lab guy" who may or may not have anything other than a basic understanding of computers using hardware that's no longer made and hoping to cannibalize, use second hand and find in bins somewhere.

If this "lab guy" isn't up to the task, then why are they entrusted with something so critical with nothing done about it in approximately two decades? If they are up to the task, then why isn't a solution with longevity and real risk mitigation being taken on? It is a short-sighted mentality to just kick it down the road over and over again plainly hoping something critical is never lost.

There is absolutely no doubt that a $250k piece of lab equipment came with a detailed service manual.

Providing eternal software updates and support is not the same as providing a service manual.

pretty obviously unethical

Perhaps under some kind of "intuitive ethics". From a consequentialist perspective this model provides more R & D funding for better microscopes and is therefore the morally right action. A utilitarianist would argue that the greater public benefits from more highly developed microscopes while only the owner of the microscope benefits from opensource software.

your company breaking it

Discontinuing support is not "breaking it". As in the OP, the owner of the microscope is still using it - it's their responsibility support continued use, not the manufacturer.

Profit must always go up

This is a redditism and only really true of venture capital funded corporations, primarily info tech. Almost guaranteed that a microscope manufacturing company is owned by a university and as such self-sustaining profit is perfectly adequate.

our brains are so broken by this.

This is hyperbole but suppose you're really just saying that we're accustomed to thinking about things in a certain way. I would argue that most commenters are indeed used to thinking about things in a capitalism = evil kind of way. Certainly there are grave shortcomings of capitalism, but it is not completely without virtue. Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research. There's an argument to be made that while the capitalist approach seems wasteful because the microscope becomes superseded, a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there's no motivation for efficient research and development.

Goodness me.

Of course you're going to buy the one where "you're sol after it's service life" because that's the one who's manufacturer has been able to afford to invest in any R & D.

All things being equal, if there's a company who's model is some kind of eternal service life and another with a limited service life obviously the latter will be a better product.

Most commenters here are talking about a lab budget in the same way you'd manage household finance in some kind of "buy it for life" philosophy which is just not how org budgets work. Managers don't work on a life long time scale, they want the best results from projects with limited scope. You buy the best microscope that you can afford, not the one which is going to have continued support 20 years after you've left the org.

I don't think you've really thought this through.

If you force a company to continue support they will just give it a stupid price tag. "Sure we will continue to support this $250k microscope, if you would like us to write a windows 11 client for you that will cost $1m."

Sure, support costs $1m per annum.

Come come. We both know that handing out free copies of something you authored is not analogous to continued support of lab equipment.

When giving away free copies you're not denying yourself a future sale.

This comment is based on the assumption that the company manufacturing the lab equipment is enjoying unreasonable profits, which is not necessarily the case.

You can't force companies to support software. They will just attach an impractical though reasonable price tag to continued support. "Sure we can support that microscope, it will cost you 2x the price of our new model".

This would force companies to continuously improve

On the contrary, there's no money to invest in development of newer models if no one will buy them.

When you buy a car, it’s your car for as long as you can keep it running.

Soo.... exactly like this microscope? It hasn't dropped dead, it's just no longer actively supported.