I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.
Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
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Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#12A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working.
Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#13The OS/2 and Win95 days were a wild ride. I remember being paid by Microsoft to hand out copies of CDs entitled "Arrive in Chicago earlier than expected" to students at the University of Waterloo back in Sept 1993 (I was a student there at the time) - it held a mashup of OS/2 and Win95 that was bizarre to say the least.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#14I never get used to the idea of how important and yet how transient digital assets like this are. Now, we rely on a third party (Internet Archive) to preserve this because of their good will.
And the goodwill of the thousands of us who donate to the Internet Archive every month (or year).
There are lots of people who believe in Internet history, and try to do something about it..
But yes, if everyone thinks "someone else has got this", then we will lose our history slowly but surely.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#15Not to rag on New Mexico State, but I'm totally going to rag on New Mexico State -- how hard can it possibly be to "maintain" something like this? Given that the software is from the '90s, it can't possibly total more than a few gigabytes? And the bandwidth surely can't be huge. Finally, what "maintenance" is even required?
NMS surely has a large connection to the internet, so what this amounts to is one lonely machine sitting in a rack in the far back corner of a server room. Or maybe they don't have a server room -- then give the responsibility to a half dozen incoming CS freshmen.
And if that's too much trouble, hand it off to literally any other university. Someone has this, and it should have to fall to the informal role the Internet Archive is playing here.
That said, I don't know NMSU's circumstance. The whole place could be going away for all I know.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#16A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working. Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.
Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#17A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working. Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.
Gotta give credit to Microsoft too for their legendary commitment to backwards compatibility.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#18I must applaud the webmaster though for providing such a convenient way of downloading the entire archive in a single file. :) If only every disappearance off the surface of the web was handled this gracefully with a warning several months ahead in time...
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#19I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.
Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at…
Oh? I thought you may have been thinking of the 1993 book by Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM which is where I know it from. It gets mentioned on page 103.
Re: Hobbes OS/2 Archive is shutting down
#20A few days ago, my girlfriend installed Corel Draw 10 in Windows 11 and it just amazed me how long good software keeps working. Corel Draw 10 is over 20 years old, and it still works. With installation wizard and everything.
Although it is easy to criticize Microsoft (and I often do) they are very good at keeping old apps running. I believe PerfectTablePlan v1, which I wrote in 2005 still works on the latest Windows. Apple, on the other hand, like to nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years.
Anecdotal, maybe, but three of the apps I am currently running on this M1 Pro are quite old and work the same: Adium (last build almost 7 years ago), Slate (12 years ago), and Notational Velocity (13 years). Laptops go, but my .app bundles stay ;-).
I agree about Windows, though.