I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who's retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
There is genuine money to be made in learning the "dead languages" of the IT world. If you're the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
I've seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it's not worth it.
Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you'll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that's a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
I'd honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it's still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
Yeah everytime someone says "just learn COBOL, you'll make tons of money," it's like,
Bro.
There's a reason no one wants to write new software in these languages anymore, let alone maintain a forty-year-old pile of technical debt.
This is one of those fantasies people have. You might as well hope to win the lottery.
Imagine being the only person who can play a extremely custom instrument. Unless someone absolutely needs you, you'll be sitting and hoping to get a job. Worse, a company is more likely to hire some people to rebuild it rather than hope to find this unicorn who can do this.
Source: Been in the industry for 15yrs. I'm one of those guys you hire to migrate old software to a web app. And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.
Been in the industry for 10 years and i deeply disagree with you. I work in COBOL.
Not that migrations don't happen, but in my experience, many, many companies kick that can down the road each year, because migrating huge and critical services is extremely costly, time-consuming and risky. In the short term, just paying people to maintain the dinosaurs is waaaay cheaper.
Also, it's extremely easy to get a job in it ( my company now hires people with no IT background and tries to teach them cobol from scratch ), because even though it's a niche, the demand for it still outweighs the supply of people willing to learn it.
Will it die out eventually? Maybe. I've been hearing about its death for a decade, so i've become skeptical about it in the short-term.
Edit : would also like to point out that it is indeed a fantasy that it pays truckloads of money. Does it happen? Sometimes, but you need to be really good and experienced at it.
Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
piracy isn't theft, but how do you feel about "stealing" from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers' labor.
Originally copyright was like 15 years and if the thing was really good for you then you could Apply for a second 15 year term.
30 years is a long time to get a monopoly over something. As a human being, 30 years is a significant part of your entire lifetime. From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives. They're retiring, some who smoked or did other things are dying of old people diseases.
I believe strongly enough that 15 years is a reasonable copyright term that my book, the graysonian ethic, which I published in 2021, has a note on the legal page releasing it to the public domain 15 years from the first date of publishing, and in jurisdictions where you can't do that, it's licensed under the creative Commons zero license
If I want to own the rights to another book, I can write another book. If I can't make back the money that I spent writing and publishing it in 15 years, then that's a me problem, not a society problem the police can help enforce.
The famous song Happy Birthday left copyright only a couple years ago, and not because it timed out. The song which was written in the era of my great grandparents only lost protection from the largest state in history because after a hundred years no one could keep track of who owned it anymore.
From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives
Oh, don't hurt me like that, please...
I work in an astrophysics department and this is exactly why we almost exclusively use open source software
It's a good read, read it.
+1, do not regret
Games publishers are in a war of attention and don't want to compete with themselves. They won't sell you an old game if they can get you hooked on the new version with microtransactions and DLC with no story and sub-par multiplayer.
The next point is just making the case for open source.
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It's used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.
My friend's dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He's worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It's been going strong for almost 40 years now.
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe
Capitalism will always capitalism. "Oh, we have to provide a healthy option? Okay, it'll be the expensive option." "Oh, we have to support software? Okay, subscription models only" "Oh, we have to pay our workers minimum wage? Okay, we'll pay them not a penny more and raise our prices"
It's an endless fight... Yet, we can't stop fighting it, because attrition of our values and apathy in our actions are weapons the system uses against us.
IP shouldn't exist in general.
It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books.....and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like 'pay me for my brilliance'.
I work for a company who's main source of income is a suite of accounting, stock and job management applications, all of which are written in FoxPro. The community add-ons and support is incredible but there hasn't been any official support since like 2009.
Microsoft bought the license for FoxPro, supported it for a few years then killed it off when VB came out. I wonder why xD
The crazy part is some of our clients are turning over 100s of millions in profit a year, using this crappy, mess of a system written in a dead language, by one dude 😂
It gets worse than this.
Not only does most scientific instrument software become abandonware, but there are companies that sell instruments that use the exact same components as they did 20 years ago. The only difference is now they swapped the stainless steel parts for plastic and charge luxury car prices for what will be a piece of garbage in 3 years. These pieces have nothing to do with chemical compatibility and everything to do with increasing the frequency of maintenance that the older models never needed.
This post is so true. I work in local government in a state that has TONS of money, yet our systems to control the information for agents to determine if you keep your kids or not is still based on MS-DOS. it's insane to see in 2023
Regarding "the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new", I'll invoke Hanlon's razor.
I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.
They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.
And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.
Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it's developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).
I love this post. How can you have the rights to something you don't support?
I don't know how we can't legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just... throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it's going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it's just garbage.
When Windows dropped support for XP, our NMR lab decided to change the OS of the PC linked to the NMR machine to Linux. Since I don’t work there anymore I don't know if they were able to do that successfully.
Stallman was right.
COBOL is still used heavily in banking, it would be the ultimate abandonware if it wasn't still getting supported.
God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I'd have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90's or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.
So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.
I'm not a programmer or anything, but I've heard decompilers have gotten better over the years.
The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
My bank started using Quickbooks file format if I want to download a transaction history in a specific date range, what a fucking nightmare. It's not abandoned yet but nothing except the QuickBooks proprietary software seems to open them so far, only a matter of time. Honestly at this point I might prefer the nightmarish CSV filetype.
CSV isn't nightmarish, it is just a table structure in text form. You can open it with any text editor.
Csv are easy to open in any spreadsheet software. You can even copy/paste it straight into some of them, e.g. LibreOffice Calc
Beware opening CSV in Excel. You will lose all your leading zeroes, among other "helpful" edits. Sometimes the leading zeroes are there for a reason!
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