[Looking4Truth]

I also write analytical software for both office and engineering needs. Used to do it in C, but came to like VB in my old age. Both have easy access to any major database, or even oracle. One funny story, was I at a plant last year talking to the operations manager, when my eyes kept going to some spreadsheets and graphs on his desk. They seemed familiar looking. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I picked up the papers. It turns out that they were generated from a program I wrote in 1992 in borland C for Windows 3.1 for a plant in remote Nevada, some 2500 miles away. I have no idea how they got it, had no idea anybody was still using it, but they loved it, and it was running on windows 7, and made perfectly beautiful color graphs on printers that did not in 1992. My question is why does that program (that did some pretty fancy number crunching, and did some pretty fancy compression for data storage (hard drives were very small back then) still work in 2011, when Microsofts own programs don’t work for more than 3 years?

Good God man! I've seen the same type of piracy! The stories we could swap.

[dsrtsage]

It wasn’t piracy, as it was written for a plant in the same company. I was simply surprised to see it, but was more surprised that it was written for windows 3.1, and it still worked flawlessly. And that such a program (that indeed I did put alot of effort into back in the day) was preferable to modern programs...hell the program was intended for a specific type of manufacturing line, of which this plant was not one of...though apparantly it was customizable enough

[dsrtsage]

It was written when I was just a punk-a** co-op, so it was pretty specific to the task at hand for that one plant 100 miles from the nearest highway in Nevada, on a Compaq 386.