Re: OT: what's the oldest software you use often?
Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:00 pm
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, and the productivity (Quickbooks 5, Microsoft Works) and game (Sierra Hoyle Card Games, mostly) software on them.
I bought the original machine in 1995 and Quickbooks 3 shortly thereafter. When the year 2000 came around the "fix" Intuit provided was a free copy of Quickbooks 5, the last version to run on Windows 3. Not really a huge improvement on v3, and in fact broke some useful features - finding things in lists, for instance - but it still adds and subtracts just fine. Whines from time to time about wanting to contact the mothership for updates.
When the CMOS battery finally died after 20 years or so I found that instead of a button battery, it was a big rectangular block soldered to the mainboard. I couldn't replace it, so I took the hard drive out and installed it in a build I'd made around 2000. The CPU on that mainboard runs much faster, 2400 MHz instead of 100. While Quickbooks and Hoyle Card Games never hiccuped, MS Works sometimes doesn't "catch" when I try to start it, forcing me to reboot. Better than Corel Wordperfect, which now refuses to start at all.
I bought the original machine in 1995 and Quickbooks 3 shortly thereafter. When the year 2000 came around the "fix" Intuit provided was a free copy of Quickbooks 5, the last version to run on Windows 3. Not really a huge improvement on v3, and in fact broke some useful features - finding things in lists, for instance - but it still adds and subtracts just fine. Whines from time to time about wanting to contact the mothership for updates.
When the CMOS battery finally died after 20 years or so I found that instead of a button battery, it was a big rectangular block soldered to the mainboard. I couldn't replace it, so I took the hard drive out and installed it in a build I'd made around 2000. The CPU on that mainboard runs much faster, 2400 MHz instead of 100. While Quickbooks and Hoyle Card Games never hiccuped, MS Works sometimes doesn't "catch" when I try to start it, forcing me to reboot. Better than Corel Wordperfect, which now refuses to start at all.
