Factor Fanatic Posts: | 58 |
Location: | United Kingdom | Status: | |
| The list stops at the ancient HUM player in our Firefox...
Although I do agree that to some it may be useful, it is also a bit of a tease for the curious and the newbies.
The logical conclusion of the concept would be achieved if at least some of the source files were hosted... if not by HPC Factor, then at least by some software vendors.
Who is going to chase up licensing on a system which is so long out of date?
Or more to the point, pay a bunch of corporate lawyers to do so.
And to what end?
They're never going to make much money out of it, or even sufficient publicity to dissuade others.
There aren't enough Jornada 72xs still going, or even in use, to pay the consultation fees alone.
Even Microshaft aren't that far gone.
Surely most of the items listed could now be safely classified as Abandonware...
And if not, then why is there no easy way to seek these license-holders out and pay them nominal fees??
As a simple example, I sought to justify my continued use of my '728s and my '820s after I had completed the work that I wanted to do with them. They were headed for entombment in the ubiquitous "storage"... where they would join a large box full of tape streamers (remember them?) and tapes, a disturbingly big stack of swaddled and carefully mummified Atari STs etc etc.
Then I read here about the Softmaker programs. And soon after I found a further reference to a software CD still being marketed by our friend Usedhandhelds. Parting me from the charge for that CD was probably justifiable, and there was a fair bit of other full-version software on there... it just wasn't as much interest to me as Softmaker's programs. I never could get excited about pims and meeting planners. Meetings were something I avoided. I am a firm advocate of the old adage that a Camel is a horse, designed by a committee.
But those two Softmaker programs almost re-vtialise and re-justify the J72xs, and they ran pretty well on the expanded '820 too.
BUT... you'll have your list, just as much as I have mine... BUT!!
Try getting them to participate in your WiFi.
Yes, if I revert to WEP... which is full of security holes.
And yes, you can overcome that singular drawback, by using WEP with a MAC number table... BUT!!
Now try asking Softmaker for support or even simple questions about the Textmaker and Planmaker on the Jornada versions.
Contrast it say, with the guy at PocketDOS.
Softmaker don't specifically declare the Jornada version of Textmaker and Planmaker as Abandonware, but they might just as well.
Like most of the others perhaps, they're afraid of making a precedent. And yet there are exceptions... didn't a Spreadhsheet recently go this way for example?
Creaky old Hum MP3 player is another. {BTW, if you ever acquire a basic Jornada 820, that’s the only mp3 player that I ever got to work on one.}
Now although we might regard them with some affection, and perhaps we might wish that things were otherwise... the fact remains that in these days of Android Tablets, with free downloadable software that easily goes way beyond the functionality of a Jornada or indeed an iPhone… old HP Jornadas (and their software), and indeedf the market model that they occupied, are antiques!!
The potential for any revenue from them now must be absolutely minimal. Yet the illusion of their dwindling vitality and the ephemeral value of licensing software to use on them, still doggedly persists.
I recall making the suggestion... must have been quite a few years ago now... that the dba files... that we surely must keep, if only to avoid the dirge of trying to recapture the favourite J72x machine model that we might have lost otherwise... could usefully be posted to somewhere like HPC Factor. If for no other reason than to help any computer archaeologists of the future, and indeed antiquaries of the present, to see the true potential that we all believed these little old computers actually had.
In that respect alone perhaps I am more conscious of this than most here, not least because I was one of the original advocates of the Atari Portfolio. In fact if you ever manage to acquire one of the old DIP Professional attaché case models, you will find me looking back at you over the decades, from their product guide.
Now they never achieved anything like the user-base and popularity of the Jornada 72xs, and what software still exists for them, is now Abandonware. In fact there is an Atari Portfolio website, aside from my own, which hosts it all. {http://www.atari-portfolio.co.uk/}
You still see the occasional software offering from an American outfit, who bought up the contents of two warehouses of Atari Stock when they went bust. They usually offer either a peculiar BASIC language which actually demands a run-time, or a chess, or a few financial Spreadsheets, all of which are supplied on Atari Portfolio's unique version of pcmcia cards. Proportionately, the Jornada had a much bigger software base, but that software user base is dwindling by the day, and if you factor in the Android Tablet effect alone, I can see the day coming when reality really bites and the J72x base descends to that of the Atari Portfolio. A curiosity, in a footnote, in a few of those on-line computer museums.
You can shoot me down and point to “recent” Jornada releases, like that nice little Sudoku, but the fact remains that no one writes for the Jornada now, any more than any one writes for the Portfolio. Any “new” software which works with the Jornada is either an old version (like Softmaker) or it’s been cleverly doctored (too cleverly for me it seems) from later versions, which were written to work with WinMobile 2oxx.
It’s just a thought, stimulated by this simple evidence of the-once considerable catalogue of software which existed for the Jornada 72x.
QF
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