> My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks
Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).
The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.
(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)
Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media.
Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?
There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article linked from HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)
Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own the market for word processors and spreadsheets?
At the higher level (CEO) no one thought Windows 3.11 will succeed. So much so that even MS thought that OS/2 would do better (and it was technically superior). So neither Lotus nor WP were willing to invest in a windows version prior to the launch.
It was not an inevitable outcome.
WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 ran on many platforms, including Unix (I don't know which flavors).
I don't think people would want to have to boot directly into WP to do word processing and into 123 to run spreadsheets, especially in the age of multitasking and embedding.
There wasn't some alternate strategy they could have pursued. Microsoft developed market power with DOS and Windows, which simultaneously means that productivity tools need to be offered on that platform or they can't make sales, and that Microsoft has the ability to priviledge its own productivity tools.
Maybe you could try to play hardball when Microsoft started their productivity tools and convince them to cancel it, but that would have been anti-competitive and also needs a lot of prescience to predict Microsoft's future actions.
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive free access to their entire Steam library or not.
This can easily be changed if Gabe Newell dies, commits a crime, or gets divorced, his estate or trust wants a change in direction, a lawsuit costs Steam a ton of money and they need to get cash quick, take your pick.
I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.
I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.
This. You can get all original Wii games in the used market for little money and this gives you the flexibility to play backups of your original games without loading and unloading discs, faster load times, etc. I understand piracy is the number one goto, but not all sums up to that.
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game.
This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):
My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually making music with their synths bought modules he would be out of business. Can't find that trailer now or I did not watch carefully enough now. There are a few different ones on youtube.
I’m pretty sure the person who said that quote about non-professional musicians who purchase Eurorack modules was Paul Schreiber, who passed away about a month ago.
Gonna look it up, and I’ll edit this post when I find out.
Edit 1: Didn’t find the quote from the film yet, but did find [1]this video (unedited interview from I Dream of Wires) where Paul explains how he himself is not a musician, but rather an engineer.
Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).
The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.
(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)