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I have mountains of stuff, lots of it is software like old versions of Visual Studio and older IDEs, along with books for learning a number of long obsolete tools, like MFC and TurboPascal. Many years ago, when it was impossible to afford any MS product on a normal income, a member here generously sent me a version of VS that I could never otherwise purchase, and got me up and running again. I would hate to throw this stuff away and later learn that there was someone here who could really use it, either to learn, or to support an older product. But I have no idea how to find anyone who might need what I'm about to toss. Can someone make a suggestion? I'm sure there are others here in my same predicament.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Storage is so cheap these days that I don't bother to throw away stuff. Just file it somewhere. I never find it when I need it but that's OK, I always find it the next day 
Mircea
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ditto
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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There is no such thing as cheap storage. This is physical product, not software images. I have an entire room that I cannot traverse on foot because of the piles of books, papers and CDs. Oh, and there's a few guns in there, too, along with a bunch of ammo. I have a 45' shipping container sitting in the middle of a 20 acre parcel of land filled to the brim with "stuff" that I can't even get to. I had to bury the doors with my tractor to keep the tweakers from breaking into it when I'm away. Now I have to hide my tractor to keep them from stealing it. In my back yard, I have a 10' x 10' shed full of containers of books - mostly computer related. This has got to end, but I don't want to trash anything any of my friends here can use. It's a quandry...
Will Rogers never met me.
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I see! Your problem is orders of magnitude larger than mine. 
For CD's I made them all ISO images and put them on a NAS. I have 16TB available so I could store a bit more than 20000 CD's and I've never had anywhere near that number. Floppies and zip disks (remember those?) had the same fate. Good thing I did it before my zip drive died. Most documents have also been scanned as well as some books that I was particularly attached to.
If you make a list of what you have, count me among those interested. Good luck!
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: If you make a list of what you have, count me among those interested. Good luck!
I'll put you on the list, Mircea. This won't be soon, but it's something I have to do! I wonder if my copy of ProLog for DOS will run on Windows 11? AI is starting to look big!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: ProLog for DOS
I remember this from my first year in the college. We had to create a maze and save the Little Mermaid using a predicate language. I feel old now.
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My old DOS based TurboProlog doesn't work on Win11.
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Pretty sure you can spin up a Win 95 in a VM on Windows 11. Win 95 ran on MS/PC-DOS (it was shell on top) so that instance would have it.
And, if I recall correctly from somewhere (either this site or a story in the newsletter) you can run Win 95 without a license now.
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Ah, Turbo everything. Back when I had more money than time, I bought everything Borland came up with. Aside from Pascal I never got further than the equivalent of Hello World with most of it. I should have spent the money on Microsoft stock.
I may still have the box that Paradox came in. It was just the right size for an early IoT prototype.
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Oh my goodness, hahaha, when I started college doing graphic design, if someone had a 1GB zip, they were considered rich... 🤣🤣🤣
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Lose the guns and ammo. That will free up some space for non-lethal books and so on.
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Roger, here's what I would do...
Imagine that you are going to move into a new house and the move is 1000+ miles away. You can pack a couple of pods or drive a rental truck and the new house is a typical 3/2 with a garage. Then play take it or leave it.
Anything in the leave-it category can get divided into groups like dumpster, thrift store, and sell. Storage isn't cheap and moving it is even more expensive.
I had stuff on 5-1/4 floppies a few years ago. I gave some to a coworker for wall decorations, recycled the boxes and books and trashed other stuff. I hadn't looked at them in a zillion years, I don't have any box with a 3-1/2 drive, no less 5-1/4. I have one with a DVD that hasn't been on for years and whatever valuables that are on it aren't worth anything.
If you have time, look at Ebay and see if anything has any interest. Don't look at 'for sale', look at sold. In most cases, it isn't worth the cost (and hassle) of shipping.
People will often take some of the stuff for free, and they'll do the same thing you're doing with it; put it on a shelf and never look at it again. Declutter!
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Do you have a copy of BitFont source code? I wrote it and distributed it for a fee in the 1980s but lost the code on unreadable floppies. There is a line of code that I want: one line I wrote to get the day from the date in any year, taking into account leap years and maybe centuries.
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That's easy. If you want it in C here it is, day of the week from day, month year:
int dow (int y, int m, int d)
{
static char const t[] = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4};
y -= m < 3;
return (y + y/4 - y/100 + y/400 + t[m-1] + d) % 7;
}
I know I'm not supposed to post code in the lounge but it's for a good cause
Mircea
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 Thanks! But I got it all in one single line of Turbo Pascal code. That's what I wanted to replicate, just because.
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Thanks! Been there before. Got the distributable but not the source code.
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I'm not a hoarder or a nostalgic kind of guy.
Scrap and Recycle all that crap.
There's no value in any of that; technology does not age well.
Schools use free stuff or educational products.
And amateurs also free code tools and languages.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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I've been getting back into old systems; Z80, want to do 8085 or 8086, 8051, etc..
I'm a book lover, would love to know what you have.
As far as software I don't know if I could use it or not.
Would be more than willing to pay postage and incidentals.
Give me coffee to change the things I can and wine for those I can not!
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - An updated version available! JaxCoder.com
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I'll make a note of that, Mike. At the moment, I'm staring at VS 2008 Standard edition and VS 2010 Professional edition (Academic) taking up space on my shelf, but there's a ton more. When I get it all into a list, I'll put it up here, or contact you if you have email enabled.
Will Rogers never met me.
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For a long time, i had a Visual C++ installer CD, the 16-bit version. Must be still at home.
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Somewhere around here, I think I still have Visual C++ 1.2. Or was it 1.4? I don't remember, but I still have the Scribble tutorial book that came with it. What a useless scrap of paper... When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation. I despise them for that, and always will. A light went out in the Universe when printed knowledge ceased to exist, and MS started it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: When MS discovered that they have no talent for writing technical manuals, instead of hiring people who can write, they just quit providing documentation.
Well, the first thing that happened was that the users stopped reading the documentation.
Old memory: I was working in an office landscape then, and heard the guy in the cubicle across the walkway receive a phone call - he was a support guy for the Fortran compiler (it is that long ago!). Obviously I could hear only one side of the conversation- It went like this:
Yes, what is your problem?
I understand ... Do you have a Fortran manual at hand?
Could you open it on page 147?
Good. Will you read out to me the first paragraph on that page?
Oh sure, that's what we are here for, to help you with your problems. Have a good day!
The fun thing is that this support man never picked up his own Fortran manual to find the right page; he took it all from memory.
So all companies stopped writing manuals, more or less. (Some environments never had any - I refuse to call *nix man pages 'technical manuals'). Those companies providing 'something' on paper should be ashamed for calling it 'documentation'. More than 30 years ago, I saved in my scrapbook a comic drawing of a totally broken down man, weeping at the psychiatrists desk. The psychiatrist tries to comfort him: "Having been diagnosed as a dyslectic doesn't mean that you have to give up a writing profession - you can still make a great career in computer documentation!"
Practically speaking, no companies provide good documentation, and hasn't done so for several decades. If you ask for manuals, textbooks, tutorials, they say that they leave that kind of stuff to independent writers and publishing houses. But even those writers usually deliver mediocre quality. One part of it is the readers' expectations: I buy several books that have a very high rating and lots of recommendations on Amazon and other sites, and when I get the book, it proves to be a mess, poorly organized, terribly useless examples, extremely wordy with lots of unnecessary repetitions yet missing essential information, usually with a useless index (sometimes not updated from the previous edition, so the references are all wrong!)
I never had the impression that MS documentation is (/was) any worse than the others. They are all that bad!
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