John Higginbotham &lt;higginbo(a)netpath.net&gt; wrote: It was the text in surrounding by <rant> in your January 4 message: I'll restate what you said, as I saw it. One, there are self-appointed software cops - you mean people who defend copyright, even of old software? Two, that today's computers run old software too quickly - that doesn't sound like archaic software to me, if it's running directly on today's machines and OSes. Three, that ancient games don't "hurt" today's software market. Doing what? Four, you say the ten-year-rule "should" apply to games, making them (who sez?) be PD/freeware. Five, that games don't increase productivity and that "collecting" them (pirating them?) doesn't cause harm. And in your reply, you say that even if the developers sell their old games, they shouldn't expect to get the old retail price, so ... so, you say they should give up on them? A tenth of something is still something. My point is that people want to play games as much as use anything else when it comes to old software. They want to recreate their experience of years ago. Emulation and re-creation can be very handy! I'm surprised there aren't non-MS products that streamline the gotcha's out of running DOS, Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.x software under Win95/NT. Or maybe there is and I haven't heard of it. I'd love to get a copy of Brief that wouldn't hog so much CPU in DOS emulation under WinNT. I'm still running my 1986 copy. Is that archaic? Don't get me wrong and think I'm just flaming you... I agree, I wish there was a better mechanism that authors of extinct software could use to allow new life for their old software. Sort of a national park or conservatory for old software would be nifty. If it resulted in payments back to the registered authors, I bet it could work. You'd need to find volunteers altruistic enough to donate their efforts in order to be able to send other people checks. The checks might be small or non-existent - perhaps the authors understand that the price charged would just fund the charity set up to distribute the software. It would be a strange sort of charity, sort of like the Old Actor's Home, except the charity cases might be Time-Warner or the programmer who was a millionaire at 15 with his Commodore 64 games, who's now pushing 30 and running his own 200+ person company. In terms of effort, the hard part will be tracking down the proper owners of all that old software. - John Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>