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Dan Bricklin on Software That Lasts 200 Years

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the in-it-for-the-long-term dept.

Lansdowne writes "Dan Bricklin, author of VisiCalc, has written a great new essay identifying a need for software that needs to last for decades or even centuries without replacement. Neither prepackaged nor custom-written software is fully able to meet the need, and he identifies how attributes of open source might help to produce long-lasting 'Societal Infrastructure Software'."

1 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Word 97-2000 You are Wrong by tessonec · · Score: 1, Redundant

    In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.

    And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.

     What? do you think your brand-new Office XP will flawlessly read your 10 years-old Word 2.0 .doc file???

    just googling a little bit shows that you are not right

    Not to mention .doc changes between different archs (MAC, X86...)

    So...

    Microsofts encourages upgrading of Office installations through a lot of questionable means, but the Word document format isn't one of them.

    It IS another of them