1990 called, they want to their software back
This was a silly thing to do, but I noticed this message on a private mailing list I subscribe to:
Is there a [good] deal for PC Anywhere? One of my clients needs me to have it
and I just had to respond:
Ya, and I need a copy of QEMM. Got a few TSRs I need to load into the UMB. Oh, and Stacker 2, my RLL 50meg Winchester Drive is filling up with Borland’s new TurboVision headers.
And since my own dorky response made me chuckle out loud, I thought I'd share.
What archaic (meaning: older than like 2 years ;) ) software does your workplace force you to use? Discuss.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Musings
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 8:44:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) by Scott # Comments [1] | Trackback
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as far as I can tell, it's 7:35pm 1/2/07 EST here right now...how can it be later than 8:44:59 PM PST?
-james
PC Anywhere (version 10) (there are current versions)
.NET 1.1
VB6 (yes - current development - NOT Maint)
VB3 - YEAH VB3
Various Custom Controls for VB3 and VB6
There are a few others - but...
Ah come on :)
I'm spending the next month with a bank writing HTAs to drive their PE setup. Aggh. The worst has to be two years ago, .net 1.1 on NT4.0. Which wouldn't have been so bad, except they wanted to use Crystal for reporting and that was painful, what with needing to track down merge modules for dbghelp, update ATL and all sorts of other hoops.
Thanks for the fun Scott!
Rowland
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...version 4.
I'll leave it at that.
I wrote for them in 1995, in Turbo Pascal 5.5.
I'm not sure if they are still using it.
Nadav
Other than that we have a huge collection of antiquated hardware both at work and at home, a huge CPU collection and a collection of old machines (everything from a genuine IBM PC to Apple III to Amiga to...). They're fun to play with -- I still fire up the A500 for an occasional Speedball 2 tournament!
2 years ago, I was working at a division of the Deutsche Bank. At some point in the early 90s some business analyst wrote a ton of code in the Lotus 1-2-3 scripting language (i guess it was some type of Basic) and they ran their entire business on that spreadsheet. Of course, to say that the code was spaghetti would be an understatement, but it worked well. Then the guy quit and when Lotus came out with 32-bit version of 1-2-3, the spreadsheet's code just wouldn't run. So they kept in the 1-2-3 16-bit running on Windows NT 3.51. When the division was upgrading to Windows XP in 2004, the upgrade was actually held up for a couple of months because Lotus 1-2-3 16bit would not run on XP (something about network drives not being accessible).
Ah, fun times.
We did finally get the go ahead to work in .NET 2.0 though... still waiting on being able to use an O/R mapper.
SQL Server 2000
What's this .NET thing everyone keeps talking about?
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Well, it's actually not that bad; we are doing some new development with ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL 2005. But, I wish they would let me install Vista and Office 2007 on my workstation.
Netmeeting isn't to bad even though Microsoft did hide it a little bit more in XP then they did in the previous versions of Windows at least it isn't some of the more frustrating tools.
I still have to use VI at work sometime. Now that's old.
VS 2003. At least we just moved to SQL 2005.
And barryd beat me to Windows XP. ;-)
Oh, and Office 2003.
The last company I worked for was still using an AS400 from the late '80s and PickBASIC. You can still get PickBASIC programmers!
Visual FoxPro 3.0 (current production)
Office 2000
AS400/RPG
Needless to say, I'm stuck supporting stupid COBOL EXEs that require some directory on some server that can be accessed via UNC paths so the EXEs will run.
I'm not sure why he hasn't actually learned C# or VB by now. Just getting rid of the licensing server would be worth it to me.
I guess NetExpress knows how to make $$$.
Lame design to me.
With amazing features such as not printing to network printers (Network printers? what are they), not seeing buttons in the GUI unless you run AppCompat. Performance improvements when running NetBEUI in your protocol stack (Yeha, lets hope we don't have to cross any routers! I mean who would ever want to hook up more than 5 PC's together pfft thats just crazy talk!)
Visio 5
IE 6
And best of all, our company's IT asset database runs in MS Access.
Yeah, I know! Luckily I am not forced to run the corporate standard desktop on all my machines. My own build of XP boots quicker, logs on in a fraction of the time and the apps are way more current. Of course, if I want to share a Visio 2003 diagram with others, I have to export in a format they can use... and Visio 2003 doesn't export to Visio 5. I usually end up using CutePDF to create something they can actually view.
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