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Vintage software you legitimately use on PC's?

offensive_Jerk

offensive_Jerk

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Just wondering if there are users who have software (not games) that they still have a legitimate use for.

Anyone they actually use a certain vintage software for anything in particular and why? Is there a vintage version you prefer, or a type of software not available, or in a format that is no longer compatible with anything else?

I don't really have anything to list, but anxious to see what some responses may be.
 
I use Vernon Buerg's LIST all the time, even on modern PCs. I use version 7.3d from 1990, because I don't like how hitting Esc on the newer versions dumps you back to the directory you started from, instead of exiting to DOS within the directory you've navigated to within LIST (which is great, because it makes a fantastic directory navigator, not just a file viewer).

I also frequently use ACALC, the command-line calculator from IBM's PC DOS 7.0 (which, being released in 1995, is getting close to "vintage" these days).
 
vwestlife said:
I use Vernon Buerg's LIST all the time, even on modern PCs. I use version 7.3d from 1990, because I don't like how hitting Esc on the newer versions dumps you back to the directory you started from, instead of exiting to DOS within the directory you've navigated to within LIST (which is great, because it makes a fantastic directory navigator, not just a file viewer).
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I use List v9.0h and just a light tap on the ‘X’ exits to DOS within the directory you've navigated to within LIST so it's just as simple but actually better as you now have a choice of where you prefer to be dumped. :)
 
I use some older Word Processing versions to convert files that were created 20+ years ago.

I haven't done it in the past few years but I have modified code written on very old compilers to keep elderly setups running. If nothing else, it provides a great excuse to keep older systems available.
 
All the hate towards Elm eh? Doesn't have to be vintage but I live mostly in a command prompt/CLI world. It's often easier and quicker to type commands even for enterprise windows environments in cmd than clicking into a nested gui option and it gives the ability to do most commands via a remote command prompt or command line session. Pretty much all our unix/linux environment is remote command line (no GUI) and I use psexec all the time for a remote cmd prompt on systems to get something done quickly. Again not vintage software but perhaps vintage thinking that can be used back to a vintage system.

I did still write stuff in qb4.5 until about a year ago when we moved to 64-bit Windows 7 and my compiled exe's wont run anymore.
 
eeguru said:
Does (al)pine count to read mail?
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That's properly hard-core!

I still use Turbo Pascal 6, mainly because it's the only IDE I ever got fluent with and since my target platforms are still the same PCs as 20 years ago :)
 
Stone said:
I use List v9.0h and just a light tap on the ‘X’ exits to DOS within the directory you've navigated to within LIST so it's just as simple but actually better as you now have a choice of where you prefer to be dumped. :)
Click to expand...

Hitting ESC has been in my finger memory for over two decades now, so I'm not going to re-train myself just to suit a change the late Mr. Buerg made somewhere along the line. He made a great program, but I don't have to agree with everything he did with it in the later versions. :)

And I still haven't broken my habit of using WordStar Ctrl-commands, some of which the MS-DOS Editor in Windows XP still supports, such as ^Y to delete a line.
 
I don't use vintage software on my modern rig because none of it will work any more. On my vintage machines, however, I regularly use the following and usually have them installed on every machine with a FAT filesystem:

John Junod's PC Valet
Mike Brutman's mTCP suite
pkzip/pkunzip
pkunpak and lha for extracting older archives
list (v7)
sled

...plus I wrote my own utils for various things (fast ASCII-string-in-binaries viewer, dumping a diskette to a raw image, file splitter/combiner) and those go on as well.

On systems with larger hard drives (80MB+) I usually install my favorite vintage DOS dev tools:

Turbo Pascal 7
Turbo Debugger
Turbo Assembler
a86 (for super-quick .com generation)
 
barythrin said:
Doesn't have to be vintage but I live mostly in a command prompt/CLI world.
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Indeed. I don't use much vintage software on my modern system, but I use a lot of direct decendents of vintage software. Bash comes from sh which was released in 1977. Vim comes from vi which was released in 1976. All the typical UNIX command utilities, sed, dd, and so on function very much like their 30 year old counterparts, even if they don't share any code.
 
Hatta said:
Indeed. I don't use much vintage software on my modern system, but I use a lot of direct decendents of vintage software. Bash comes from sh which was released in 1977. Vim comes from vi which was released in 1976. All the typical UNIX command utilities, sed, dd, and so on function very much like their 30 year old counterparts, even if they don't share any code.
Click to expand...

Same here. I use vi daily. My IDE is still vi/make/printf. Still use X11 (even on OS/X).

To the OP, how is vintage software defined?

As for vintage HW. I use my ~30-year-old HP 15C and/or 16C almost daily.
 
Once I get everything going, some of my old software I will run is Norton Commander, Norton Utilities and a checkbook software called BankMate (it will be funny to see what I was spending the paychecks on in the 80s and early 90s).
 
I (and a client) use the following pretty well every day:
dBase II
Foxbase
Word Perfect 5.1
PC Anywhere V
ProComm 2.4
Qedit
Turbo Basic
And various DOS utilities.

(As well as Windows 98SE, XP and 7, MS Office, etc. of course)

As Chuck points out, that old stuff runs as well today as it did then, only orders of magnitude faster; stuff that took 6 to 8 hours back then takes about 30 seconds today.
 
I have a friend who still manages his contact list using CP/M Datastar, running under Z80 emulation. Datastar (from the Wordstar people) wasn't even that popular in its heyday, but he became accustomed to it.
 
Not as vintage as some, but I ocasionally use Instant Artist 1.0, a Windows 3.0 program to print custom greeting cards and stuff. It has a great selection of general vectorized clipart that the newer versions just don't match.

The funny thing is software doesn't age. Only people's requirements of the software change. If the requirements don't change, then there is no reason a piece of software can't stay useful forever.
 
MikeS said:
As Chuck points out, that old stuff runs as well today as it did then, only orders of magnitude faster; stuff that took 6 to 8 hours back then takes about 30 seconds today.
Click to expand...

And that's a very strong argument for using that stuff today, even if one has to forgo some (even a lot) of features.
 
Tomn8tr said:
Once I get everything going, some of my old software I will run is Norton Commander, Norton Utilities and a checkbook software called BankMate (it will be funny to see what I was spending the paychecks on in the 80s and early 90s).
Click to expand...

So you still have the data files for your checkbooks back in the 80s, you mean?

I see nobody mentioned the old spread sheets like Visicalc or 123. I was wondering if those ever get touched anymore, or if they are too archaic?
 
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