What do you guys and gals do with your old software?

[Elwood P Dowd]

I must have 40-50 old software discs collecting dust around here. Everything from OS 7.5 installs to Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to old DiskWarriors to OS 8.6 to Norton SystemWorks to AppleWorks 6.0.and who knows what else. Some are registered to me, some were never registered, and some registered to a former business partner. I am thinking about taking a pic of the whole lot and putting them on eBay. What do you think?

[Richard Steele]

1. I keep mine safe, like a scrapbook I'll someday show my grandkids.

Of course, I also accumulate and use old "outdated" computers,
so it all goes hand-in-hand.

I'm using a 1994 UMAX scanner- it still works well, so I've
no reason to buy a new one.

Of course, it doesn't work with OSX, so I have it connected
to a 75mhz PowerMac running OS 8.6 set up as a file server
to this little iMac.

And as long as that old thing is plugged in anyway, I keep
a CD in its drive holding "Crystal Caliburn Pinball" and a
few other of my old faves.

[Elwood P Dowd]

2. I still have my old blueberry iMacs plugged into the wall

so their batteries don't crap out - an old tray loader and the first slot loader from 1999. It's a pain in the ass changing those $5.00 batteries. Actually, the slot loader still works fine even on the internet using OS 9.1. Some of the eye candy and videos won't work, but if your just reading news articles or DU forums, it's still a decent computer with DSL.

[Richard Steele]

3. I saw the most amazing pile of old hardware the other day...

We went by the local Thrift Store, to drop off a trunkload
of old clothes and such that we have accumulated from helping
various friends relocate over the past year...

The big gray rolling "donation" bin was overflowing, and surrounded
by many boxes, so we added our boxes to the pile; I noticed a stack
of what appeared to be old external 5 1/2" floppy drives.

On my second trip in, I got a closer look, and realized that they
were actually old Sun™ microcomputers- a whole pile of them,
10 inches square and 3 feet high.

Awsome stuff- no modems, no card slots... just a CPU and some RAM
designed to be daisy-chained to a central station in some 1990-era
lab environment.

And they ran their own unique OS, which has gone to the realm of
wind & ghosts just like the dinosaurs.

Wouldn't you know, I didn't have a DIME in my pocket?

20 or 30 years from now, that stack of SUN™s would be a million-dollar
display in some Computer Museum...

*sigh*

[moggie]

4. You mean the JavaStation?

Like this:



There are people who still run those! Though these days they're more likely to be running Linux on them, rather than JavaOS.

When you said "10 inches square" I at first thought you were referring to the SPARCstation IPC or IPX, which both looked like this:



But those ran Solaris, Sun's Unix, and Solaris is still very much with us. I used to run a bunch of them as servers, and another load as workstations. I think we've still got a few gathering dust in the store room.

[Richard Steele]

8. JAVASTATION! That's the word I couldn't think of! Thank you!

The first two on the stack didn't have the "JavaStation"
inscription or logo, just the "Sun" trademark. No drives,
just an AC input and a pair of SCSI ports on the back.

I wish I knew jack sh*t about UNIX- it would be great fun
to stack those things in a tiny custom cabinet and put them
to doing something useful.

But I don't, so I can't. :evilfrown:

[moggie]

11. Those would have been disks

(Could have sworn I posted this this morning, but it hasn't appeared, so I'm reposting)

The JavaStation-1 used a case was was very similar to the one Sun used for some of their external SCSI disks, so those two without the JavaStation name would have just been disks.

If you have a Mac, you have Unix (unless you're still using OS 9). You can also run various other flavours of Unix (including Solaris) under OS-X, using VMware Fusion or Parallels (as long as you're on Intel). I use VMware, and have about half a dozen Linux and XP virtual machines on my iMac and MacBook, for various testing purposes. It's enormously useful. If you want to learn Unix, take a look at VMware, because running a virtual machine removes that worry that you'll screw something up and have to start from scratch.

[alfredo]

5. I have all my old Mac Addict discs.

[Elwood P Dowd]

6. They're good at scaring away deer from my garden.

Last summer I put some yellow twine all around the garden and hung a bunch of old disks like that from it. The deer must not like those shiny things rotating in the breeze. Also hung a few aluminum pie pans, but I think the old AOL disks were the most effective at scaring the living shit out of the deer. They never touched the garden.

[alfredo]

7. AOL would scare anything away. I had a cat that was afraid of those

Wacky Wall Walkers. When we saw he was using our garden for his sand box, I put a bunch of WWW's on my garden and he kept his distance.

[Elwood P Dowd]

9. I miss the old AOL disks almost as much as the DU posts by our friend Nomad.

Those were the good old days. Oh hell, I just found another Mac Addict disk from September of 1999 along with a still sealed "Welcome To America Online" and a MindSpring version 3.06. Look out deer!!

[alfredo]

10. I have all of Mac Addict's disc except for #1.

We have raccoons. The disc wouldn't work, they'd think they were put there for their entertainment.