Antiques in London and Washington

Monday, August 16, 1999 by Dave Winer.

***London Sunday Times and Washington Post 

Yesterday and today two writeups for Antique Software on two venerable news sites, the London Sunday Times and the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/feed/a3591-1999aug16.htm ;

"Many of them seem better than today's multi-featured applications, which are powerful but overextended pieces of programming that always do far more than the task you bought them for." http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/08/15/stiinnsnd01001.html?999 ;

"Dave Winer, another of Bricklin's peers, has a growing site covering historic software at www.outliners.com. He was one of those responsible for MORE, a superb word processor, outliner and presentation package for the Macintosh. You can download MORE 3.0 from Winer's site and it still runs on many Apple machines." 

***Congratulations 

Congratulations to Lotus and Symantec for leading the way. Gifting antique software to the Internet is an act of generosity. People have asked how they can show their appreciation. It's simple. Buy more Lotus and Symantec software. Show other companies that follow that goodwill among Internet users is a profitable business model. 

***Open and free ideas 

And to the software artists, be thankful that they want to let their ideas to be free. As far as I know VisiCalc didn't create any patents, even though they surely could have. And we didn't register any patents for our early outliners at Living Videotext, the company that Symantec acquired. 

As the Linux community is now discovering, this kind of generosity may prove to be far more important than gifting of source code. It's a complicated world! Some people are generous, even if not on your terms. Thanks to Dan Bricklin for not leaving any landmines behind in the VisiCalc intellectual property. It's important. 

***Antique News 

It should come as no surprise that I've started a news page with links to stories on antique software. Help us spread the word. Download and use the stuff and write about it. What did you learn? Does it give you any ideas? Are you a software developer? Want to start a business with the ideas from antiques? 

http://www.outliners.com/news.html  

It's not just about the past, if the ideas take life in new software created now and in the future. 

***InfoWorld and Deep Linking 

This is a short piece today. One more loop to close. On Friday I heard from a source at InfoWorld that they are going to change their linking policy to be like the majority of sites on the Internet. When this happens, case closed, back to business as usual. When InfoWorld has something interesting to report in an area that we cover we will point to it.  

***Dave Winer