The Somber Rage Behind Those Eyes

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)

One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.

I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.

They were down to a few of these disks and the company no longer existed.

Well, I ran a havker BBS and using MASM to Crack games was a hobby of mine, so I told them I'd give it a shot.

Once in a Blue Moon l AJ Smadi