As part of the never-ending tidying up I’ve recently sorted through a cupboard of old software boxes. You know they are old when they have nice boxes, printed manuals and lots of floppy disks.

It’s been hard to dump them, but they’ve not been used for more than a decade and would have difficulty running on modern kit anyway. I had tried to load up a copy of the original “UFO:enemy unknown” as part of playing UFO:AI but with limited success. It was going to take a virtual machine running DOS 3.3 or 6 to get some of these dinosaurs to work. But what a bygone era! So recent (at least in geological terms) yet so very different. The graphics, the sounds, the capabilities, the costs! Nostalgia is fine but once you see these things for real you realise just how old they are.

So into the recycling goes Quattro Pro 5 - an excellent spreadsheet till killed by Excel. So long Borland Paradox and Serif Page Plus, killed by Microsoft Access and Word respectively. Au revoir DOS 6, jilted by windows XP and Corel Draw is no more. The gaming front is even sadder: F15 Eagle II, Stunt Island, Falcon 3.0 and 4.0, Flight Simulator 4.0 and Rage’s War of the Worlds among others.

I did briefly consider doing an Ebay on them but a quick check showed lots for sale, but no buyers. So no useful money to be made there. Hence it is off the the great formatting in the sky. Well not quite, couldn’t face dumping the disks so I’ll see if they can transfer to CD.