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While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason. Th

• bjornjajajaja 7y ago
  Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same document with others. It would be fun to use an older machine and see how productive you can be with the old software too !
  • joking 7y ago
    Been hit with that, I needed to run chromium v49 to be able to remote debug some TVs with old opera tv sdks, the version I had stoped working, and several versions that I tried crashed when using the chromium devtools. I ended having to use a windows virtual machine
  • scarface74 7y ago
    You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?
    • ajross 7y ago
      True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3". The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        Apple shipped the last 32 bit Mac in 2006 over 10 years before 32 bit software wasn’t supported. There were plenty of FireWire to Thunderbolt adapters. No the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7. There were Carbon APIs until last year. A poster up thread said they could use an emulator. There are 68K Mac emulators available too. AppleScript for instance is a System 7 technology - not a NextStep technology.
        • cptskippy 7y ago
          > the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7. How do you figure? System 7 was part of the Classic Mac OS line, the last of that line was System 9 (Mac OS 9). This was a proprietary kernel developed by Apple. Mac OS X is a Unix based OS derived from technologies they acquired from NeXT. To say MacOS X is an ancestor of System 7 seems completely nonsensical.
          • scarface74 7y ago
            No MacOS X when it was originally released had parts from NextStep and parts ported from Classic MacOS including QuickDraw, AppleScript, QuickTime, some audio frameworks etc. The entire Carbon API was a port of classic MacOS APIs to make porting from classic MacOS to OS X easier. MacOS X was a combination of both. That was the whole brouhaha of why Apple ported Carbon APIS to OS X because major developers like Adobe and Microsoft insisted on it. That’s not to mention that the first 5 versions of MacOS had an entire OS 9 emulator built in. To take the analogy to the extreme. MacOS had two parents - Classic MacOS and NextStep.
            • cptskippy 7y ago
              I would disagree, most of what was brought from Classic OS was ported, adapted, out of necessity and short lived. OSX was an entirely new operating system that ported some frameworks and software but wasn't backward compatible. Were it so, they wouldn't have provided an emulator. I think you're just supporting the original assertion that Apple does not support things for very long. Does Software written for OS X v10.1 run on Catalina today without using 3rd party tools or emulators? Software written for Windows 95 still runs on Windows 10.
    • ygjb 7y ago
      Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox. Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in. It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud services get to conventional computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A Deepness in the Sky...
      • scarface74 7y ago
        So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?
        • criley2 7y ago
          Virtualizating Windows isn't very hard, even back to something like Windows 95. On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in VMware. This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc virtualization software, but if you need to run osx software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck. You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.
          • scarface74 7y ago
            A quick Google search for running PPC Mac software under emulation. https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#powerpc https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#pow... For the most part yes. If you want to run Mac software you need to own Mac. As far as going back 30 years. Now you’re in the Classic Mac era. There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old. If you want to go back 40 years. Apple // emulators are a dime a dozen.
    • cptskippy 7y ago
      You're drawing an equivalence between 5 and 25 year old software? Microsoft Windows 10 is able to run software that predates all of Apple's supported platforms.
      • zamalek 7y ago
        There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you could imagine.
        • scarface74 7y ago
          So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator? Someone else was complaining that they didn’t keep FireWire. Should modern Macs come with ADB ports?
          • Ahwleung 7y ago
            Obviously not, but that doesn't prove that there isn't value to having backwards compatibility. Sometimes you just want something to run and not have to touch or change it for a long time. A 20-year old machine that's critical to a factory can run off a serial cable plugged in to an expansion card running software written in the 90's that will still run on Windows 10. Nobody in their right mind would decide to write that same software on a Mac.
            • scarface74 7y ago
              Well, given where all of the PC manufacturers are that were around in 1990 compared to the revenue and profit of just the Mac division, it seems like Apple didn’t make a bad business decision not prioritizing backwards compatibility. If you compare where Apple is and where Microsoft is also, it doesn’t seem like chasing enterprise PC sales was as good of a long term bet as going after the consumer market....
          • 7y ago
    • usrusr 7y ago
      And so the mystery of why a 32bit version of Windows 10 still exists is solved. What's mildly annoying is that much of the early 32bit Windows software came packaged in 16 bit installers. Office 97 would be such a breeze on modern hardware.
      • dmz73 7y ago
        Office 97 can be installed on 64 bit windows 10 with original installer. I have done it just last month and it runs without any problems... and it is fast.
        • kaetemi 7y ago
          I had some selection rendering issues in Excel, and Word is reporting some kind of registry corruption on startup. Otherwise, works fine.
        • tinus_hn 7y ago
          There are special workarounds, many of the old installers run a small piece of 16 bit code which doesn’t work in 64 bit Windows but because it’s so common Windows just runs a replacement version.
          • usrusr 7y ago
            Failed the last time I tried, which must have been on 7. Will be a strong example for Microsoft dedicating resources to compatibility if they added it for 10 or with a patch update. (both their resources and the users', there's a crazy amount of checking for necessary compatibility hacks going on whenever an executable is started)
      • quink 7y ago
        > https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/win32/winprog64/application-installation?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/win32/winprog64/app...
    • int_19h 7y ago
      There are some third-party implementations of NTVDM that allow running 16-bit DOS and Win16 apps directly on Win64. Although DosBox is still the easiest route, and "good enough" in practice.
  • Moru 7y ago
    I wish I could find the movie on youtube again, a demonstration of collaborative text editor from 1960-ish. Been looking for it a number of times just this year.
    • danShumway 7y ago
      Please post back if you find it, I'd be curious to see.
      • Moru 7y ago
        As posted by Fice above: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/ https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/ It's a very interesting show, how they solved the displays with commercial cameras filming the lcd displays in the lab and sending to the users screen. How the mouse worked, five button keyboard and so on.
    • tech-no-logical 7y ago
      from the mother of all demos (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&feature=youtu.be&t=1h16m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&feature=youtu.be... I suppose you mean this video ?
      • Fice 7y ago
        A better link: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/ https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/ And also: https://archive.org/details/dougengelbartarchives?sort=titleSorter https://archive.org/details/dougengelbartarchives?sort=title... because youtube videos are ephemeral.
        • Moru 7y ago
          Thankyou, that was nicely indexed even!
• randomdude402 7y ago
  I know a person who is maintaining a few sites she built in like 2005 with a version of Dreamweaver a little older than that, so never dares to upgrade the Dreamweaver version. The whole thing is terrifying and horrific to me, but they keep paying her to do the work so she's fine with it.
  • bpfrh 7y ago
    Dreamweaver 2003? I know a website that is still maintained regulary and built with dreamweaver 2003
  • wolco 7y ago
    You would just edit the html pages lol. I still use dreamweaver for the visual editor if I need to copy and paste from a pdf and want perfect html. No one has made anything like it. No current editor has a quick sftp that allows you to connect/edit move on.
    • cptskippy 7y ago
      Early versions of Dreamweaver were pretty slick. I used it as my primary IDE for developing ASP pages in early 2000.
    • vraivroo 7y ago
      Coda does.
      • SyneRyder 7y ago
        As does HTMLPad 2020, the closest I've found to a Coda clone on Windows. (It's not as good as Coda but it gets the job done.) That said, neither app has the WYSIWYG editing that DreamWeaver had. But I've always preferred to hand ode my HTML anyway.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    I mean .. it's just a static HTML editor at that point (maybe it does some includes/builds to simplify things). If you're just pushing out static content, you don't have to worry too much about outdated libraries and security issues, so long as the web server it's being served from is maintained and up to date.
• generationP 7y ago
  Can't you just keep editing the html in a text editor? Frontpage's generated html isn't that unreadable.
  • Santosh83 7y ago
    Presumably the author used a WYSIWYG editor in the first place because he is not a technical person, so for him/her to now not only learn enough HTML/CSS/javascript to turn to hand editing but to also understand Frontpage's noisy output would probably take enough effort that they might rather decide to shut down the site if they're not able to continue using Frontpage. Hiring a dev to redo the site is another option but that presumes they have enough money to invest in a hobby site...
    • woodrowbarlow 7y ago
      ironically, i bet the author has learned more technical skills by maintaining a system that can continue to run their version of frontpage than they would have if they had just taught themselves HTML from the start.
    • olyjohn 7y ago
      I ended up learning more HTML by having FrontPage, because it would regularly fuck everything up and I'd have to go fix it by hand.
    • generationP 7y ago
      Nah, I don't think this is such a big deal. Adding a row to a table is much easier than creating a table from scratch. And Frontpage's output isn't that noisy -- I had to go through that experience myself. That said, my old Frontpage from 2005 (which I copied from Win XP probably) still works fine except for a warning it throws at start about not finding some registry value. I wouldn't want to use it any more (it doesn't understand CSS and screws it up), but if I wanted, I could.
• YourMatt 7y ago
  Also note that a Java Applet is included in there, which has likely not worked since 2015.
• Scarbutt 7y ago
  VMs solve this problem.
• randogogogo 7y ago
  Looking at the page source it looks dead simple to modify. I know it isn't WYSIWYG but it's just HTML.
• znpy 7y ago
  OTOH, I guess that maintaining a windows VM for use with frontpage would be a lot simpler and safer than maintaining an old software stack server side.
  • geekrax 7y ago
    (OTOH = On the other hand)
• HenryBemis 7y ago
  I properly own several versions of Office all the way back to 95 so I can say this as I am covered :) Years ago I found a "Portable Frontpage" which of course I downloaded and still have somewhere zipped. I know that MS wouldn't like this much, but life is life and Portable Frontpage exists. So as long as there are Windows, Frontpage will work!
• alxlaz 7y ago
  > The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. But at least getting it done largely depends only on them, and it's not too hard. I have friends who swear by ProTracker and still use it, even though it's thirty years old and the platform it's running on has been dead for more than twenty. They don't have an Amiga but it's trivial to get it running in an emulator today. You can run Windows 98 in a browser, and your web editor in it. It's certainly less complicated than hosting a WebObjects application today.
• tinus_hn 7y ago
  Actually the browser makers are shouldering the burden of supporting the dredge output by FrontPage. Remember that the intention was to make it work in Internet Explorer and crash in Netscape.