From the late seventies through the ninties there so many different
companies that came and went...Autotrol, Cimlinc, CadCentre, Graftek, MDSI, Control Data, CV..

Where did all that stuff go?

My searches into the "whatever happened to's" typiclly found:

1. Out of business
2. Absorbed by somebody else
3. Evolved/morphed into something else
4. Combination of 2 & 3

EDIT: the hardware is still working in obscure areas, in land fills or in electronic surplus houses or lurking in used equipment warehouses with the current owners having no clue how to use or sell the "valuable" stuff....

Lots of neat idea software companies got driven into state 1 by competitive pressures or folks not realizing the benefit/uniqueness of their software. Lots of times "newer" software is created that really doesn't do things any better - its just newer or was rehashed for an O/S.

Lots of neat, perfectly good DOS software got obsoleted by Win and there wasn't a market big enough to justify redoing it from DOS to Win...

Ahhh, the advantages of progress and new technologies.

By the way, we just found that the latest version of the M/S XP Pro Office Suite won't run a simple VB fortified spreadsheet that was originally created in Excel 95. Doh!!!

Wanna bet that M/S is intentionally NOT making their newest softare versions backwards compatible???

How else can they coerce you to buy their latest 'suite' (or should I say, in my opinion, crack house)???

Visual Basic programmers that have been around a while are peeved because the new visual basic isn't compatible with the old.

Msoft also makes a new version of their developement software every year, and you can't open the projects from new versions on the old software. We're talking about $1000 each year for incremental updates.

That's my beef:

I can understand (but not like) why "old" won't open/run the "new" version of a file created with a software U/D.

However, when a "new" version of a program (IE: Excel in this case) won't run a VB code in a spreadsheet that opens/runs in 95, 98, 2000 etc but won't in the latest version of Office, that is malicious and it sucks.

At some point the customers are gonna say "screw it" and quit buying their newest "update". Even the most profitable business can't afford to waste the time redoing all their code each and every time a new update gets released.

When programs were sold separately and updates affordable, maybe so BUT, as a small business owner, I can't afford to toss a perfectly good version of a "suite" and spend $500 or so for some new whiz bang features that I don't need or can't/won't use.

For 99.99% of the cases, Office 95 or 98 won't do any more or less than the latest version does and my versions were paid for years ago. It simply doesn't make good business or economic sense to buy something that doesn't provide good value...

These software guys are gonna piss people off at some point and things will change. You can shear a sheep many times - you can only skin it once....

The complaint I have is that there is no difference between the project files, but they have changed it so you can't read them. And there is no such thing as an incremental upgrade, you have to buy new

I agree with this quote from NC Cams "that is malicious and it sucks" when a later release of software is not backwards compatible. A radical solution for this is a slight modification to copyright law which says that if a company stops selling and supporting a copyrighted product and if succeeding versions of the product are not backward compatible then the features of the discontinued product become public domain.

Fat chance of modifying copyright law to protect the consumer. The law is designed to protect the OWNER of the intellectual property and to some extent, the person who licenses it from the owner.

Moreover, the law has the finger/hand prints of special interests written all over it. Hence, you can bet that as soon as someone would propose to modify it so as to make unsupported "legacy" versions public domain (can't happen due to the prior provisions of the law), you'd have any number of special interests clammoring to quash the proposed legislation.

Once you get a copyright, you have pretty much acquired perpetual rights to it - even so-called abandon-ware is copyright protected although it may not be taken advantage of by the copyright holder.

Search out and READ Section 17, U. S. Code which deals with copyrights. We did so recently for a federal lawsuit and learned that there are a lot of people out there who have totally WRONG perceptions of what the law means/provides for....

Besides, the copyright law involves a number of international treaties which will be readily modified and agreed to by the particiapants on the second Wednesday of next week....

I did use the word 'radical'; I agree it will not happen.