Old machines die, and commercial software is vanishing into a
digital dark age. If your old SparcStation-4 was serving licenses of
your fully bought and paid for commercial application and the machine
dies, you are truly out of luck.
Contacting the software vendor is, for the near totality, impossible.
They just don't exist anymore, and in the isolated cases where they
do, they don't exist in their previous form, having been acquired
several times over.
One or two vendors survive, and contacting them invariably results
in something like them not having any what you're talking about,
laughing at you, ignoring you, or when they do answer you, they tell
you they lost the ability to generate the keys a long long time ago,
for they no longer have their commercial software protection vendor
API, nor the encryption keys used, nor the seeds.
They will try to sell you the latest wares though.
What about software preservation, archeology?
All that information, knowledge, work? It's astonishing that vendors
are not obliged by law to deposit a copy of the source code of their
commercial applications in a national library.
Completely protected by copyright just the same, and with restricted
access, but deposited for safe keeping nevertheless, for the future.
In the eventuality that the software is EOL, the company vanishes,
technology becomes deprecated, obsolete, people die.
Recently i had the opportunity to install a few old applications in
a emulated SparcStation-5 under QEMU, with the Fujitsu MB86904, the
TurboSparc, and the TCX/S24 framebuffer.
These retrocomputing, software archeology, digital preservation,
whatever you want to call them posts, start then in full SVGA glory
with beautiful 256 bit color palettes, and all the artifacts that
they produce, whether regularly used, or when your plotting window
pops up, grabbing the attention of X for the new palettes.
We start with Maple Vr3, from 1994 in maplevr3_1.gif[1].
The second image, maplevr3_2.gif[2] shows a notebook running with
some plots. The color artifacts are due to the choice of booting
Solaris with theTCX/S24 framebuffer set to 1024x768x8, so 256 colors.
It looks like the active color palette is being optimized for the
active window.
