There is a vast body of computer software that can no longer be used on modern computers and operating systems. Some of these programs are still great, even by today's higher standards. As time goes on and companies forget about their old products, or are bought out by larger corporations that abandon unusable assets, we will reach a point at which the greatest desktop software ever made is no longer usable.
Though this topic has been on my mind for years, it came up again recently when I discovered that a program that I thought was great -- Macromedia Freehand -- is being killed off in favor of Adobe Illustrator. Freehand fans have known this since Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia many months ago, and I was peripherally aware of this fact, but it didn't really hit home until it was time to review the new round of Macromedia tools. I've got Illustrator CS3 here for review, but I haven't gotten to use it yet and don't yet know if it's truly a replacement for Freehand. I suspect that it isn't; Freehand was a vector drawing tool that focused on aiding Web page design. All of the programs in the Macromedia Studio suite were designed at their core to be about creating content for the Web. Illustrator, on the other hand, has always been focused on being a great vector graphics program with a slight bias toward print media. Both have their merits, and I would expect fans of each to say that their favorite is the superior program. Killing off Freehand won't make people like Illustrator, though, especially if it does not have the same functionality. Removing Freehand diminishes the usefulness of both Flash and Dreamweaver, particularly for people who were used to using the whole Macromedia suite to design Web sites.
You can't write an article about dead software without mentioning BeOS. I wasn't into Be systems when the company was still alive, but ever since I saw the open source Haiku rewrite of BeOS for x86 machines, I've been convinced that this is a superior desktop operating system design. It is not a hodgepodge of various open source programs like Linux, nor is it a hodgepodge of various proprietary programs from a variety of different companies like a Windows environment generally is. Its modular design keeps BeOS from being a huge and unmanageable project like FreeBSD, and gives it security and stability that Apple OS X can't ever hope to match. Be, Inc. was killed off by both Microsoft and Apple through separate means, and its software assets were sold to what was PalmSource, or what is now known as Access. Presumably Access still has the BeOS source code someplace, but won't give it out to anyone -- or even license it out to companies that want to sell updated versions. Rumor had it that Access was going to use the old BeOS code in a new mobile device operating system, but it appears as though those plans were cancelled in favor of a Linux-based solution. So what will become of BeOS? Access won't answer any media inquiries about BeOS, so we may never know... except to honor it as another inhabitant of the proprietary software graveyard.
Near and dear to my heart are the old Sierra On-Line PC games. This was the company that defined and pioneered electronic role-playing adventure games. They had an idea for a MMORPG that predated World of Warcraft by several years, but never found a way to build the infrastructure to support it. Sierra also had the first graphical online gaming service called The Sierra Network, but though it was popular, it was not profitable. There were so many tragedies at the old Sierra On-Line that a technophile could not hear them all in one sitting without shedding a tear. The greatest among these misfortunes was that Sierra went public, was bought out (eventually) by Vivendi/Universal, and killed off the adventure game genre. All those old DOS games are lost to history, their adventures and stories confined to past-EOL floppy disks and abandoned 20MB hard drives.
It didn't have to be this way -- these companies could have released the source code for products that they never intend to use again, allowing the people who paid between $20 and $60 (in 1980s money) to continue to enjoy the products they purchased beyond their initial limitations. The proprietary software graveyard does not have to exist, but it does exist, and continues to grow because of the senseless selfishness and blindness of a few ignorant software corporations.
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