Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?
Personally, I postponed upgrading my Mac to Catalina for longer than I should have because it meant giving up YummyFTP (32-bit only), which had powerful synchronization capabilities that I have not found elsewhere. I miss it.
I also oddly miss Norton Speed Disk. I got a certain OCD satisfaction from knowing that all the bytes on my hard drive were organized.
I was wondering what software other people miss being able to run.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 2035 ms ] threadI also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning.
(Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/)
I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins.
In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway.
You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.
imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/
Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.
Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...
I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.
No regret, it is mostly fun!
It's actually a much nicer experience than trying to play it in a Dosbox emulator on the web: https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html
https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...
The most cynical, half-assed, unwinable, borderline unplayable pile of crap that is trying to be passed off as lemmings. It's like they gave a first year programing student two screen shots and a bad description of the game and then ran that through even worse machine translation and the result was shipped directly to end users.
I've lost so much data with DoubleSpace! Not something I miss :-)
Those files were created by chkdsk from orphan files (with no entry point in the directories) in the File Allocation Table (the table that gives the "FAT" name to the filesystem). After chkdsk, the filesystem was consistent again.
Such orphans appeared when the OS crashed or the system went off during file writing operations. Of course when that happened while writing on a compressed filesystem, the problem was not a lost file but a corruption. Sometimes the compressed filesystem was just entirely lost.
Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure.
Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively.
Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread).
Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.
MacOS. X means ten in Roman numbers.
You had your deck of cards, a computer full of perfectly organized images, the opponent had his own deck. You would show some art work or photos, they would give their opinion about it, each round you would show x more works that you thought more suitable for their taste. The other player would take their turn whenever they felt like it. What they showed allowed further fine tuning the following selection until eventually you arrived at wanting to show works you didn't get to make. You debated the plan of action and the opponent waited impatiently for days, weeks or months for the follow up session.
It's weird that people still call it Google Picasa and Google Hello as google contributed nothing besides freezing it and shutting it down.
Images purchased as stock have a lot of metadata in them.
So Picasa was able to act as a cheap folder and metadata based digital asset management system.
It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.
Relatedly, although it still exists, Apple Numbers is one of the few pieces of software that I really miss since my move to Linux. It has lots of subtle design choices that gently nudge you towards good data organization habits (e.g., If you keep an index column and title row for each dataset, you get rewarded with readable cell references).
[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6...
(Fun trivia, neither Matt nor I actually graduated from Mudd. He ended up getting his degree from Pomona College and I got mine from Pitzer.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
Emulation is good for just running software. But it has nothing to do with old sofware running on an old blowing PC, with a CRT monitor - sometimes green or orange -, with a clicky and heavy keyboard...
It is a complete experience that emulation misses.
This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files.
But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.
By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way.
Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier.
Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.
Fireworks was extensible with Javascript. Extensibility is something lacking from all the newer replacements.
I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.
Yes, I really miss Corel Xara! Stopped using it when I abandoned Windows. But it seems like there is a similar application on xara.com, Xara Designer Pro. Did anyone try this?
I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't.
To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars.
Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time!
P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person