In particular, some public safety / emergency response accounts post safety-critical real-time updates. Visiting their pages when not logged in provides data that is years out-of-date.
I'm hoping this causes a rapid exodus and my one use case for twitter goes away.
Maybe a paywalled website that is actively hostile to non-users shouldn't be considered a source of news ?
But yeah, I also don't appreciate the restrictions.
Anyway, that should provide much higher-fidelity emulation than Wine, and is also easier to keep off the network, etc. Also, I guess it runs on Arm processors these days (since it's an emulator, and not a hypervisor):
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
Wine is generally more convenient if it works though.
Very interesting. Is there a framework or helper for this?
Seems useful for things like games or audio DAWs in particular.
It shouldn't be that different for DAWs. By the way, I experimented a while ago with Alpine Linux and Yabridge to achieve a very small system that works as a host for both native and Windows .vst plugins. The goal would have been a MiniPC configured as synthesizer that boots very quick and does just that, with both studio use and live performance in mind. I got to the point plugins were converted but loading them failed. Probably using a musl based distro was asking too much, but I'll try again in the future (just moved to a new house, everything is packed) as Alpine Linux is so much faster and smaller compared to other distros that to me it makes the best candidate for building appliances where the operating system exists for the sole purpose of loading a dedicated software, therefore must not get in the way with resources consumption, automatic updates etc.
nowadays https://porteus-kiosk.org seems to be recommended (but i haven't used it).
It would be better to migrate the data to a very common format.
One of my favorites: https://fultonhistory.com/ (click on the "Go and Search My Archive" link). Tom has done an amazing job of scanning and posting old historical photos and newspaper archives, but will it last once he's no longer able to maintain it?
I often hear suggestions like "let Ancestry take them over" or "the Internet Archive is the solution." I have to ask: Will either be operational in 20 years, or the data on them as easily accessible as they are now?
Ancestry is currently operated by Blackstone, the third or fourth PE firm to do so in the past 15 years. Blackstone has no qualms with deleting services that no longer meet its needs (https://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2023/08/ancestry-disconti...) or paywalling records and then jacking up the price every few years (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-...).
IA's web archive is a great resource, but it always seems to be begging for money and its founder's futile campaign against book publishers isn't helping.
It will absolutely die with him. Its unfortunate that when the NYS Legislature appropriated money to scan thousands (millions) of newspapers to microfiche, they did not provide any funding for digitization.
CDROM is a terrible way to store data. Any frontend to dd could back the CDROM up 1:1. That should be the first and primary focus. After that and an upload of however long (depending on internet connection), the wisdom of the crowd could be utilized. Even if the requirement of Windows 98 is correct, any VM (perhaps even ReactOS) could access it.
It's been at least 10 years since I had a CD/DVD drive though, so it might have been a mode of one of the dd_rescue/ddrescue/dd-rescue programs??
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I like to believe that the best data repositories are the ones that are forgotten.
That said, I hope someone comes up with a consumer-affordable, long-term storage medium soon.
Those DVDs made of rock supposedly last a long time, but it would be nice to have something that lasts 1000s of years.
CD-Roms are still there and the the underlying tech is also still the same.
I think the problem is, thread author doesn't know how to rip an ISO of the CD or move the database out; looks like they are getting help already though.
The department discovered their newer versions of Office weren't backwards compatible, so they just kept the last PC everything worked on. It wasn't a Pentium D-series, but it was pretty close.
It's ancient Windows, OP doesn't know Access, UI looks like something from the 90s, Windows 98 is the most famous of the 90s Windowses(?).
As evidenced by how it's seemingly running fine on Windows Vista using whatever version of Access that is, either:
A) Any newer version of Access should be able to at least open that thing fine.
B) Whatever version of ancient Access that will open that should run just fine on Windows 11.
Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility shines, especially in these types of circumstances.
Given, as you say, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility, it is very likely in my opinion that a modern computer running 32-bit Windows 10 (not Windows 11, as they dropped the 32-bit version and therefore finally dropped 16-bit software support entirely) would run this software fine. It is also likely, as you say, that modern Access could import the underlying database (does Access 2023/365/whatever import Access 2.0 databases? Who knows! Not I, I don't touch the stuff ;)
I’m glad the access mess is over, I do wish you hadn’t triggered that memory though :P
edit: Reading the third paragraph here[0] it seems that all of this data is definitely stored at different museums and libraries.
[0]https://ww2truslow.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/burns-documen...
Pic is of Vista running on a HP DV6000.
Perhaps Vista was the last OS to have a 98 application mode.
He could do a Vista (or earlier) VM running on Hyper-V in Win 10/11 Pro (or hacked Home). If the WWII CD is ripped to an ISO, it'll mount like a CD.
Vista install ISO: https://archive.org/details/vista_x64
Windows 98 install ISO: https://archive.org/details/windows-98-se-isofile
2) Use one of the open source Access file readers (e.g., Jackcess) to do the same. Make a backup first!
Where I work we still occasionally use Office 97 with all the strange things it does to take over your desktop and that paperclip. It works just fine in Windows 10 and could probably open that database and see the SQL tables, it would probably not be hard at all to load the SQL tables in Postgres. I did a data import project for that kind of database and I am waiting for the QA people to tell me I did it right.
I do know I was unable to open the database w/ the current Office 365 and was told to go back and get the old Office.
