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Kudos to the ReactOS team. I've tried the 0.3.x release about ten years ago and was a little disappointed. However, after a decade I've got a new perspective to appreciate their work. I've kept several of my used laptops (Toshiba Satellite laptop, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, etc.) mainly for commemorative purpose. However, they can still boot and works fine with outdated OS's and extinct software. A potential very good use of them is to open my old archived documents, but I'd rather not to mess with these fragile machines. When I checked my old archives, usually only plain texts and JPEG photos files are fine with current OS's and softwares. Nealy all my old software projects (mostly with Visual C++) no longer compile or run, or missing dependencies (DLLs, component libraries, tools, etc.). Even though I've backup most of the tools I used at that time, most of them would be a huge pain or impossible to reinstall correctly with right system dependencies. Therefore I've come to think that the only meaningful archives are data with executables, i.e, documents with related spec, contemporary software and OS. In this aspect, a good Internet archive methodology should be like this: 1) data; 2) Fully installed and working software packages; 3) Running free OS such as Linux and ReactOS; 4) OS emulator on available hardware such as Virtualbox and KVM. The importance of ReactOS here is that we will have a working OS on modern emulator or hardware for archiving purpose. I'm omitting the hardware platform here, but it should be the other important aspect of archiving our knowledges. |