What do you do with your old software?

[Harrison]

Taking the Amiga, and other older systems, we are all now interested in trying to preserve the memory of as much of its software as we can. Scanning in the manuals, boxart and disk labels, and maintaining collections of the software.

But what do you do now?

Do you just play games when they come out and then sell them on or throw them out? Or did you store them safely on a shelf or in a cupboard? Maybe thinking you might replay them again at some point.

I always did the later, trying to keep them all in as good as new condition.

However, what about other software? Older versions of word processors and office suites, such as Office 2000, or old versions of Nero or Virus Checkers? What do you do with those?

I have piles of discs for older versions of software lying around in boxes and jewel cases. Versions of Adobe and Macromedia software going back to version 4 of Photoshop. Office going back to the 1997 edition, Nero and other Cd writing software dating back as far as thr 90's and Virus scanners just as old. But will I ever use them again? Why am I keeping them?

But like we are preserving older system software. Will we want to preserve today's software in the same way in years to come? We are after all now using DosBox and virtual machines to play older DOS and Win98 games, and big collections of games for them are now online. But other than games will be preserver productivity software for the future? It is after all a timeline of the history of software. How it has evolved since the first versions of each one. So we should really preserve it. But for some reason I just don't have the same sense of needing to preserve old versions of Office or Nero in quite the same way as similar software from the Amiga days.