Questions tagged [software]
For questions about the applications and programs that can be run on retro devices (computers, etc.)
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What was the legal arrangement between author, publisher and end user for 'type-in programs' in old computer magazines?
Today we live in a world where the idea of open-source is well understood and protected by legal gobbledygook like the MIT, GPL, LGPL, Apache, and EI-EI-O licenses. (Ok, I made up that last one). It ...
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Which generations of PowerPC did Windows NT 4 run on?
In a blog entry at The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen states that Windows NT first started supporting the 603 and 604 series of PowerPC processors. Was there a specific firmware version which was needed ...
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Snack shipped with computer products [closed]
I remember that there was a company in the US that packed candy or snacks as a bonus in the shipping box with their products. They were well-known for this practice. I'm pretty sure the snack was ...
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Is an X Window System older than release 10 available online?
I'm looking for any copy of the X Window System older than release 10.
The oldest on x.org is X10R3.
Bob Scheifler doesn't have anything.
Jim Gettys may have something, but has yet to retrieve it ...
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VIP Technologies Professional for Amiga, a Lotus 1-2-3 clone
I accidentally stumbled upon a programme named Professional by a company named VIP Technologies for the Amiga computer. It seems to be a clone (a quite accurate one) of Lotus 1-2-3. I cannot locate ...
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What was the second platform supported by SAP?
SAP, the well-known ERP software company, started out in the 1970s, with the first version of their software running on IBM mainframes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_R/2
What was unique about R/2 ...
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What was the first commercial route planning software for home computers?
Nowadays route planning applications are ubiquitous on smart phones, on embedded or dedicated devices, and on the web. With these applications, you input a destination and a starting point (or the ...
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How can software including drivers be moved from one windows (2000) installation to another?
I have a Windows 2000 system which no longer boots. We've narrowed it down to disk corruption of some Windows components, and a clean install of Windows should fix that. But there's some specialist ...
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Video playback software/formats for a 386?
Wanting to have my 386DX @ 20MHz play a video (any video), just as a demo. I'd prefer it to be watchable (eg 10fps and not a tiny 10x10 pixel) as opposed to a slideshow.
What player software could I ...
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Are there any homebrew games (or demos) for the Timex/Sinclair 2068?
I know there has long been a thriving homebrew scene for games and demos for the original Sinclair Spectrum range and also for the Russian and Eastern Bloc Spectrum clones.
But I expected some old ...
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What is the oldest UNIX available for modern systems?
What is the oldest UNIX(-like) system that can be legally downloaded and run in a VM or emulator on a modern PC running Linux?
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Which system had the first desk accessories?
Many early operating systems were single-tasking. However, sometimes small programs were developed that could share the system and user interface with a main program. Examples include Borland ...
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What was the first software company to go public?
I'm trying to determine which was the first purely software company to launch an IPO on a major stock exchange. By this I mean a company whose revenue comes directly from software unit sales, rather ...
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What is a Hollerith file on a GE/Honeywell computer?
In his description of the QED editor, Dennis Ritchie writes
READ9 and READ6 return the next character from the ASCII or Hollerith
file currently being read (if any).
I know about ASCII, of course, ...
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1
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Why was Paperback Writer renamed to Pocket Writer?
I was a big fan of Digital Solutions Inc.'s Paperback Software, a Commodore 64/128 productivity suite that featured an interoperable word processor (Paperback Writer), spreadsheet (Paperback Planner), ...
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Home-computers of early 80's, capable of saving Basic-programs, as machine-code, or assembly-code, with a little extra code or other modification? [closed]
Could many/most home-computers of early 80's, have been capable of saving BASIC-Language-Programs to cassette/disk, as machine-code, or possibly even as assembly-code, with a little extra code (or ...
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Did any PC software floating point use non-IEEE format?
During the 1980s, prior to the 486 (well, strictly speaking, prior to the discontinuing of the 486SX in the nineties), IBM PCs and compatibles had hardware floating point only in the form of an ...
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1
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Was any commercial end-user software written in PROMAL?
PROMAL is a procedural programming language from the 1980s. Its designer, Systems Management Associates, released compilers for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC. The language and development ...
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Who were the market for those "speed up your computer" shareware applications back in the day? [closed]
In the Swedish computer magazine PC Hemma ("Home PC") from February 1997 (p. 68), they included a floppy disk with shareware programs related to "trimming your PC", as well as a ...
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Were any form-based applications designed for more than 80 columns?
The traditional standard display for business computers was 80 column text (with either 24 or 25 rows).
Business software, roughly speaking, falls into two categories:
Horizontal applications like ...
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Which versions of StuffIt introduced backwards-incompatible changes to the file format?
In order to help people who want to integration-test tools which shell out to The Unarchiver's lsar and unar utilities, I'm trying to build a legally clean repository of test archives in StuffIt SIT ...
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2
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What are the "other crontabs" that /etc/crontab refer to? [closed]
The /etc/crontab file on ubuntu has a header that reads:
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when ...
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What happened to the Speakeasy computational environment?
After reading his interview with the Computer History Museum , Cleve Moler (creator of MATLAB), mentioned that the Speakeasy Computational Environment was a precursor to MATLAB, and served as some ...
user22459
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Where can I find the software for "DESIGN: a program to create data entry programs" by J. Michael Wuerth?
I have a copy of the book, DESIGN: a program to create data entry programs by J. Michael Wuerth.
Does anyone know where I can obtain a copy of the accompanying software for the book?
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What was this early 2000s software subscription that had a billboard theme and was about music and bands? [closed]
I cannot remember the name of this music software CDs I used to have. We would get it in the mail every month and it had interviews and song samples in a game style UI with a city/billboard theme. ...
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How can I run OpenSSH under AmigaDOS?
I want to use OpenSSH for Amiga, copied ssh and other files to OS:Utilities from extracted archive, but I'm unable to run the binary. Tried to set protection but it didn't help either. How to make it ...
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1
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How did voice dialing work in old Nokia phones?
For example on S40 or the 3310, users were able to set voice tags (also known as voice commands) for contacts. The phone could then recognize the command later and dial the right number.
With neural ...
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2
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Why was IBM's Scientific Subroutine Package superseded?
It is a familiar fact that scientific software tends to do a lot of vector arithmetic and similar, that one does not want to keep rewriting the low-level code for such, so the usual practice is to use ...
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New chess engines on retro hardware
Does anyone know of any efforts to write modern chess engines for old hardware? (e.g. C64, A2e?)
I'd love to see how a pared-down Stockfish or Leela that could fit in RAM could do rating wise etc.
...
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Identifying and recovering programs from tapes
A couple of days ago, I was given some old tapes with programs written on them. However, I am having some trouble with them.
I do not know what computer they were programed for. After recognising the ...
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How to get Terminate running in DOSEMU on recent machines? [duplicate]
When trying to run http://www.terminate.com/ under http://www.dosemu.org/, I get Runtime Error 200.
I know that this is a well known issue with software compiled with Turbo / Borland Pascal and using ...
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Is there any way to obtain the abandonware 1994 original release of Klik & Play in non-English, non-"For Schools" versions?
In the mid-1990s, I purchased a Swedish boxed copy of v1.0 (I believe) of Klik & Play in a computer store. Since that, the floppies have died and I stupidly even threw away the entire big box and ...
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Was imported software for computers as common as it was for consoles?
In the 90s and in Western countries, you were able to buy import software for pretty much every video game system, for instance, Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, PC Engine, PlayStation and so on.
To run ...
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1
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How did VisiCalc decide how many decimal places to display?
VisiCalc represented numbers in BCD to be able to handle decimals precisely. But how did it decide how many decimal places to display?
In some screenshots like https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-...
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What were the most common applications of the 8087?
The original IBM PC had a slot for the 8087 floating-point coprocessor. This was a somewhat esoteric feature at the time – previous microcomputers had done all their floating-point in software – but ...
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What was the reason for AmiPro's limitation in displaying two pages together when scrolling?
I have fond memories of using Lotus AmiPro word processor. If it would run on 64-bit Windows, I'd probably still use it today.
One of the most infamous bugs in the program was its inability to show ...
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Where can I find EVOC20 package for Emagic Logic 2.5?
I know the vocoder was firstly developed by the company Emagic, which then bought by Apple. Now it is part of Logic Pro X and impossible to find the original version, that can work in Windows.
Does ...
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What is the point in interpreting an integer literal differently depending on the machine?
I was reading the user manual for an old program "UNRAVEL": http://www.ml1.org.uk/pdf/Unravel_User_Manual_1971.pdf. On page 9, it describes the syntax for integer constants:
Unsigned ...
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Are there any CHIP-8 games that break if `SAVE` / `RESTORE` *doesn't* change the pointer register?
The CHIP-8 instructions SAVE Vx (Fx55) and RESTORE Vx (Fx65) are originally specified to increment the pointer register I as each register is saved/loaded, so by the end of the instruction, the value ...
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Where can I find software for the Imlac computers?
There is an emulator for the Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 computers, but not a lot of software to run on it. I know about this collection: http://www.ubanproductions.com/imlac_sw.html
Is there anything else ...
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Did many programs really store years as two characters (Y2K bug)?
The claim that programs stored dates as two ASCII or similar characters because computers were limited in resources seems wrong to me because it takes more memory than one 8-bit integer would. Also in ...
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How much time and how many people were required to develop Delphi version 1?
I would guess the compiler was primarily a modification of Borland's Turbo Pascal, while the Integrated Development Environment and Visual Component Library required a lot more development from ...
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Where did the lookup table in Entombed come from?
Entombed is an Atari 2600 game where you move through an infinite vertically-scrolling maze and try not to die. This maze is procedurally generated, with two bits from a PRNG (underlined) added each ...
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Does the "Amiga Client for Novell NetWare" exist?
On page 139 of Brian Bagnall's book "Commodore: The Final Years", there is the statement that at CeBIT Hannover in March 1989, Commodore announced (amongst other things) "Novell Netware for Amiga".
I ...
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Understanding the meaning of the term "Modifying a software program" in a book
In his book The Silicon Jungle David Rothman mentions several times the term "modifying" or "customizing" a software program.
e.g. Chapter 8:
And then the consultant didn’t even supply instructions ...
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Unix Haters Handbook - guaranteeing synchronous, atomic operations
I've come across Filesystems with versioning and have been reading through the Unix Haters Handbook, linked there. I came across page 85:
On the other hand, techniques for guaranteeing synchronous, ...
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SID to WAV converter that exports per channel separately
For a C64 SID project of mine (https://soundcloud.com/c64er) I was using an converter almost 10 years ago, but it is missing now with its name... I researched many sites, but no lucky. Is there any ...
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Were there any games/software that used a resolution or resolution-mode higher than what was advertised available on the machine?
Were there any games/software that used a resolution or resolution-mode higher than what was advertised available on the machine ?
On home / personal computers between anytime - 1984 .
Without ...
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9
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Were there any games/software that used memory beyond what was advertised available to BASIC on the machine?
Were there any games/software that used memory beyond what was advertised as available to BASIC on the machine ?
On home / personal computers any time up to 1984 .
Without needing to plug in any ...
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1
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Can't install El-Fish on MS-DOS 6.22
El-Fish is a fish tank "game", where you have virtual fish on your screen. The game has no goal, it's more like an interactive screen saver.
I got my version from a number of different sources, one ...
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