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Dead software that you loved
TelevisionUser
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Following on from this article here http://www.zdnet.com/six-clicks-dead-software-we-loved-gallery-7000028313/#photo, what now-defunct software did you love?
My nomination would be the easy-to-use Lotus Smartsuite (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_SmartSuite)
My nomination would be the easy-to-use Lotus Smartsuite (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_SmartSuite)
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I think I sort of mourn the original Paint Shop Pro - before it tried it be a cheaper, crapper version of Photoshop. Along with GIF workshop, they were a perfect set of tools for making all sort of graphics - from stuff that I used in my early games, to web-site stuff.
I also sort of miss working with Borland's "Turbo" development products. Things like Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ were my main tools for a while I was at college, and both allowed me to write lower-level code in assembler. Stuff using make files and all the silly buggering about that they involved - Turbo Pascal and Turbo C had proper IDE's and debuggers that worked amazingly well (as long as you weren't messing around with non-standard VGA video settings).
Lotus 123
Word Perfect
Fortran 4
Was that the one where you could select the photos you wanted to print on single page, move them around and adjust their sizes?
I've got a Canon with Garden Rubbish, and it's a nightmare printing 4 pictures to a sheet!
Netscape Navigator
Memories...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdtzYl2_Ioc
They then decided to switch over to WordPerfect although personally I never liked it.
My dad still uses that for photo editing. He even managed to get it working on his Surface Pro! It took a bit of faffing around but he got it to work. He uses it on his Windows 7 laptops as well.
On the Pc, I miss Netscape, Lotus word pro,, my sister-in-law still uses it sometimes. that is about it to be honest.
If you go to Operating systems, I miss my Amiga, I would love to get it back up and running. what I may do at some point is buy a old Mac mini, pre intel and get Amiga Os 4.
It still is!
I'm still using it on my Win7 64 pc. Had to do a fresh install and at first it wouldn't work. It needed an update patch which seemed to be no longer available. However, it is still used by many so Microsoft made it available again. There was a workaround involving ripping and reburning a revised disc but using the patch was so much easier.
Never found any reasonable alternative. Hopefully I can keep it running for a while longer.
dBase
Lotus 1 2 3
Harvard Graphics
This was my favourite Usenet reader back when i was on Windows and was the only piece of software i missed when i switched to Linux (tried to run it under WINE back then and was not successful).
I thought it had died a couple of years later but it seems to have been open sourced and a new version was released in 2010.
FORTRAN is not as dead as you think- many major engineering companies still use FORTRAN as the heart of their software programs. Admittedly, it has developed GUIs etc. which dear old FORTRAN 4 never had, but the base core is still the same.
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-cobol-1820.html
Even though COBOL was criticised as "verbose" it had a very powerful COMPUTE statement for complex calculations - was it really worse than any other language?
Talking of COBOL, this is the Fujitsu (ICL) SCL job control language for VME (another system that won't die). I believe it was extended to include simple file handling operations (OPEN CLOSE, READ WRITE), I never used those.
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-scl-848.html
I never used S3 which was a lower level version of SCL, an ICL person once told me much of VME was written in it. I'm not sure was this code is actually doing.
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-s3-849.html
Lol, one of the alienated customers then?
FoxyTunes before Yahoo! ruined it.
I remember using that years ago.
And GEM Desktop.
GEM was brilliant on my old 8088 PC and Timeworks Publisher ran on it, along with a variety of other apps.
I also liked MS-DOS Editor & QBASIC from the DOS days.
I also miss Apple's LiveType, it was very straightforward to use. Also liked the old iMovie HD, the newer versions are an abomination.
MicroFocus still make quite a bit of cash out of it. They even have a Visual COBOL package now.
COBOL was designed for a very narrow set of tasks, and from my point of view, that meant that the verbosity and specialized functions limited its usefulness and made the language just irritating to work with. Clauses were unnecessarily complex, probably because the people responsible for its design were not computer scientists.
I can write COBOL code if required, I'd just rather not have to suffer the pain!