This is based on fundamentalky wrong assumption that software is something like a hammer or a bulldozer.
Software is more like a plumbing. It a) wears out b) requires maintenance c) people maintaining it is integrated part of the whole system.
Software is more like a plumbing. It a) wears out b) requires maintenance c) people maintaining it is integrated part of the whole system.
But on the other hand, my 1993 1 character patch to the Linux kernel was replaced in around 96 or 97. I hope to whatever benevolent Supreme being exists that the crap pyth*n code I added to Second Life has been replaced. No one still uses Palm Pilots or Handspring Treos anymore, so I doubt that code has much life in it. Virtually every web app I wrote is dead, but they were fun to write, so whatever. And the code I added to a couple of satellites is dead (though my ground station code is still alive.) I bet that some of the avionics code in the cockpit is hard to update as well.
So... it depends... my nuke plant code still has another decade probably and my old room-mate's anti-lock braking code will probably outlast us all. Embedded systems are probably more long-lived than the Facebook front page. Some are just hard to update cause you can't easily get to the machine, others are hard due to regulatory or compliance reasons.
I've been lucky to avoid the "web framework of the hour" grind... and for the most part work on heisenbugs in net plumbing. Fortunately that part of the stack will invest a little time to avoid serious problems. But their timelines are shrinking to "just long enough to sell the company and it's IP" or about 5 years.
George R.R. Martin still writes using WordStar 4.0 in DOS.
I remember reading a news story years ago about a guy who brought a vintage Mac from the 80s into the Apple Store to see if it could be a little faster. He had been using it for his accounting (or something) for the past 30 years.
Air gapped systems like these, with some degree of physical security, are pretty safe.
The real hardware gets old, wears out, parts become difficult and perhaps even impossible to source.
The operating system accumulates known vulnerabilities until it's no longer safe to connect to anything.
You can work around the latter two problems with emulation, but it's never the same--display technology if nothing else is different and presents differently. Emulation is dependent on the fidelity of the emulation. It's much harder to make it exactly cycle-and-timing accurate, though in most cases (like Word 2007) it doesn't matter.
The instructions might exist, but they are not runnable without other supporting infrastructure.
This also ignores programs that are wholly reliant on third party compute and instructions you have no access to that can be shut down and no longer available, like your MMOs.
I sometimes emulate a DEC VAX 11/780 running OpenVMS 7.3 on my phone.
The set contain bugs itself that are getting revealed over time. But more importantly end users and businesses function evolve and change and if people have no choice but to adapt to such a “hammer” - it’s a piece of crap, not a software.
While you can still buy Microsoft Office once and use it “forever”, I much prefer the $129 a year, 5 users deal with 1GB of online storage per user and each user can use office between their computers, online and on mobile regardless of operating system.
A desktop only office suite would do me no good as I go back and forth between platforms.
For your example, Microsoft can alter that price any time it sees fit, discontinue platforms you use, alter the interface drastically or cut a crucial feature in tomorrow's update... I wouldn't cope with such, and am sorry for those who must.
Word for the Mac has been in continuos production since 1986. It made through a 16 bit MacOS (I’m yada yada yada’ing) , to 32 bit “clean” System 7 on a 68040, to classic MacOS PPC to native OS X on PPC Carbon 32 bit, to x86 64 bit OS X APIs to ARM.
Would you really want to use Windows 3.1 Word in 2025? One of the major issues with Windows is that it carries stoubf cruft from 1992.
There are for instance still a dozen ways to define a string in Windows programming depending on the API and you have to convert between them