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abdullahkhalidsHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

No, but I learned yesterday that a carpenter and renovation person I know uses a GUI software from …

No, but I learned yesterday that a carpenter and renovation person I know uses a GUI software from 1996 called "FloorPlan Plus 3D 3.01" [1] to design furniture before he builds it. He has a dusty old laptop running Windows XP on which the only thing that works is this software and the connection to the printer. He showed me his workflow in detail. It's a beautiful software that does everything he needs. And notice it's only 3.8 MB - smaller than many SaaS software webpages that offer lesser functionality. [1] https://vetusware.com/download/FloorPlan%20Plus%203D%203.01/...

Original discussionAsk HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?309 source comments · at import
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UR
urnicusHN

Is anybody still using TUI applications for business? My family company is a wholesale distribution firm (with lightweight manufacturing) and has been using the same TUI application (on prem unix box) since 1993. We use it for customer management, ordering, invoicing, kit management/build tickets, financials - everything. We've transitioned from green screen terminals to modern emulators, but the core system remains. I spent many summers running serial and ethernet cables. I left the business years ago to become a full time software engineer, but I got my start as a script kiddie writing automations for this system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys to automate data entry. Amazingly, they still have a Windows XP machine running many of those tasks I wrote back in 2004! It's brittle, but cumulatively has probably saved years of time. That XP machine could survive a nuclear winter lo…

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OJ
OJFordHN

Loads of woodworking is done on SketchUp version whatever that's pre-cloud licensing, dating from 2008 I believe. (Cloud aversion , if you will.) Picasa & Earth era desktop Google software.

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UR
urnicusHN

I wonder if there is a reddit thread with people showing off their surviving Windows XP setups. Mine is a dell tower laying on its side because I harvested a power supply unit from another dell, but it doesn't fit in the case.

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AN
andixHN

I've also helped running an old Windows 3.1 accounting software. It runs perfectly fine on Windows XP inside a VM. In 2020 it suddenly came to a halt, because the date pickers just couldn't go further than 2019. Nobody seemed to care in 1992 when it was released. It was really easy to de-compile the Visual Basic 3 software (perfectly legal where I live). My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of. In the end I just changed the number 2019 in the binary to 2059 in a hex editor, and it just worked. There was only one occurrence of the number 2019 in the whole binary. I guess I got really lucky. Edit: It seems like Windows and Visual Basic are not affected by the Unix 2038 problem at all. 16 bit Windows seems to be fine until the…

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