Old Software for Sale

There's been a lot of press and blog chatter about the pending end of support for VB version 6. If MS would sell the rights to the software or if someone could make a decent clone a small company could do pretty well supporting the user base that didn't want to upgrade. My old employer, Alpha Software, still sells version of the DOS product Alpha Four I worked on almost 20 years ago, albeit updated to run in console mode on Win32. I doubt it's a big part of their business, but its enough that they keep doing it.


A couple of years ago I went to the Alpha developers conference to see some old friends who still work at Alpha or do consulting using Alpha products and they introduced me to some people who still run their businesses using Alpha Four. I remember one gentleman in particular who ran a light aircraft parts supply company who had been using Alpha Four since he founded the company. He built the application himself and understood how it worked so he stuck with it.

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