• plural they/them/themselves

the-coool-gay57
@the-coool-gay57
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dog
@dog

See also the story of TropeTrainer: essential software for learning Torah chants, which suddenly disappeared when its only author died and his widower wasn't prepared to continue selling it.


Tathar
@Tathar

There are (at least) two separate cases of artificial vision systems (one a bionic eye, the other a brain implant) being completely abandoned with the devices still implanted in patients' heads who were never informed of that risk. One is the Argus 1 and 2 mentioned here, the other is the Dobelle AVS which went the same way as TropeTrainer after Dr. Dobelle died. And unlike most software, this has put patients in an emergency medical situation before, with no one to turn to for help. (I won't go into details, too graphic.)


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in reply to @sinpyro's post:

It should go even further. I think it should be legally required that as soon as software is no longer supported (whether it's a game, firmware, system tool, etc.), it should be re-licensed to be copyleft and open-sourced. That would not only be great for preserving that history, but also allow it a new future.

Need a program from the 90s that isn't supported anymore? It may take a bit of work, but with the source code available, it could be updated to work on modern systems. Want to play a retro game? You could emulate it, sure, or you could see if there's a community maintained port for your modern platform of choice.

absolutely!!!

up until at least the mid 2000s, the National Weather Service forecast office in Miami would launch weather balloons with a radiosonde attached. The only receive-and-store-data frobozz available for the radiosondes they used ran on an IBM XT. The data was sneakernetted across the room on a floppy.

Yeah, most Big Microscope units in research labs (i.e. any facility called a "Microscopy Core" somewhere in a 3rd basement) are air-gapped. They require labtechs to bring fresh in-packaging flash drives to get the images off of them (a fresh one, every single time) to make sure the Windows Far-Too-Old system from touching anything on the modern internet it has no protection from.

in reply to @the-coool-gay57's post:

in reply to @dog's post:

it sounds like (at least with Windows) the issue here is that the existing copies of the program are 16-bit and running on newer versions of Windows, the compatibility layer for those isn't included

That's not great, but it does mean that, if I'm right, this might only need otvdm or a similar compatibility layer to work correctly on a modern machine. I may have to mess around with this.