Old Computers, Old Software

One of my customers has a collection of almost 1 million photos of birds! They have been doing it since the late 1970s. First as film based, then finally digitally based. The collection started to grow into the tens of thousands in the late 1980s, they got a database "Q&A" that has been discontinued in the mid 1990s.

They scanned and digitized their photos with bird names, Latin names, tags... and placed it all in that database.

2008, the computer is failing and they have decided to join the modern world of a graphical environment and see the world with Vista. The problem is that Q&A will not run under Vista, it's an old 16bit DOS program. We are aware of it's "almost" successor: Sesame database from Lantica, but it can't import the photos properly.

Now they can't get the photos out of the database, short of rescanning all the films, a monumental task for which they don't have the funding.

• Are you keeping both your computers and software up to a recent version?
• Are you using some "small, unknown" software that you won't be able to upgrade when the company gets bankrupt or is purchased by another company and kill the product?
• Will you go out of business, once your software becomes obsolete and you are stuck with it? If you think that I am exaggerating, one of my customers in Ontario "lost" some of its stores when the owners could not customize their own inventories,.. and they switched to a different buying group.