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0 pointsklodolph4y ago0 comments

You can continue to use most command-line FTP programs without problem. Since the terminal is a fairly stable interface, programs written long ago often have no problem compiling and running on modern systems, or only require small changes.

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mananaysiempre4y ago

I wouldn’t actually say that, but it may be more of a problem of ecosystem maturity and priorities than it is one of interface stability: I work under Linux and love it, but getting a 20- or 30-year-old program to compile or run under it is surprisingly more painful than doing the same for a Win32 program of similar age, despite the ostensible stability and undeniably better documentation, including that of historical issues, in the former case. (To be fair, getting an old DOS program to compile or run anywhere except a full VM is an absolute nightmare, even if it can sometimes be offloaded to DOSBox maintainers.)

klodolphOP4y ago

I would say it—getting a 20-year-old CLI program to compile and run is often not much trouble at all. Not always, but often.

Even if the program was never written from Linux, you can often get it to compile and run by fixing up headers and making some other minor changes to the source code. I’ve had plenty of success compiling and running programs that were only ever designed to run on IRIX or Solaris or other Unix systems.

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mananaysiempre4y ago

klodolphOP4y ago

I would say it—getting a 20-year-old CLI program to compile and run is often not much trouble at all. Not always, but often.

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