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Comment by Postosuchus

1 day ago

This is probably a wrong audience. Most people here are very technical - the kind that would not put up with tiptoeing around a sacred computer from decades ago running some magic software from the DOS era. This crowd will aggressively move it to modernized architecture or at least emulate it using a more modern platform.

The company I worked at in the late nineties, used Managing Your Money (MYM) for bookkeeping - initially on a dedicated DOS machine. My colleague set up a DOSEMU-based emulator and moved the software to it (bye-bye, dedicated DOS machine!). Later, he re-wrote it in STk (Scheme w/ Tk bindings, running natively in Linux) as ageneral-purpose transaction storage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is not always possible when the systems are validated and regulated.

  • Yeah. Sometimes old hardware forces its hand and causes a big PITA.

    I had a job working on VAX/VMS around 2009, but it was actually an emulator running on a PC because they just couldn't find any hardware to fix the VAX. At some point before I joined they had to get a ton of government approvals to use the emulator.

    Fortunately they had a project to modernize the whole stack. And it was going to Solaris :-/