The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#2I am not too worried about anything pre-2000 as emulation has got really good over the last few years, just in time as the surviving legacy hardware became prohibitively expensive to acquire. The internet archive has also made it easier than ever to access old software.
What concerns me are early 2000s stuff with DRM and server-side content to make preservation difficult if not impossible.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#3This post ignores the Lindy effect. Things that have been around for pretty long are likely to stick around for much longer.
For example, Unix, Emacs, or Firefox (Netscape) are likely to be quite popular 10 or 20 years down the line. The OS or the editor du jour is not.
This is a good rule of thumb for choosing what to invest your time in.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#4I am not too worried about anything pre-2000 as emulation has got really good over the last few years, just in time as the surviving legacy hardware became prohibitively expensive to acquire. The internet archive has also made it easier than ever to access old software. What concerns me are early 2000s stuff with DRM and server-side content to make preservation difficult if not impossible.
Cloud anything is also a huge red flag for preservation.
On the other hand there is a game I played on PowerPC macs but the developer released it on github and now it's been updated and compiled for ARM and x86. As long as source is available it's usually not very hard to port to a different architecture.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#5Stop using a Mac. I still run Windows 95 apps on Windows 11 without issue.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#6Stop using a Mac. I still run Windows 95 apps on Windows 11 without issue.
Truth. The only other Big Tech company better at consistent breakage is Google. MS is known for its legendary backwards-compatibility, although sadly is also going in the same direction as the others.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#7Stop using a Mac. I still run Windows 95 apps on Windows 11 without issue.
It depends on the app: windows vista wouldn’t run various versions Delphi that ran just fine on a Mac with WINE
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#8Stop using a Mac. I still run Windows 95 apps on Windows 11 without issue.
Truth. The only other Big Tech company better at consistent breakage is Google. MS is known for its legendary backwards-compatibility, although sadly is also going in the same direction as the others.
What direction is its backwards compatability going ?
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truth. The only other Big Tech company better at consistent breakage is Google. MS is known for its legendary backwards-compatibility, although sadly is also going in the same direction as the others.
What direction is its backwards compatability going ?
Worse. Windows 10 dropped 16-bit application support.
Re: The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
#10This post ignores the Lindy effect. Things that have been around for pretty long are likely to stick around for much longer. For example, Unix, Emacs, or Firefox (Netscape) are likely to be quite popular 10 or 20 years down the line. The OS or the editor du jour is not. This is a good rule of thumb for choosing what to invest your time in.
Emacs and Firefox are not popular right now, and the author mentioned using even more niche apps with long history, and a lot of his challenges are with things that have been around breaking other things that have been around, so how does he ignore the effect?