[andai]

This is wonderful. Just a few hours ago I was inspired to install ancient versions of Office and Photoshop.

Word 97 is 5MB and it starts instantly. I mean there is no perceptible delay whatsoever. And it starts fully rendered and fully interactive. Same goes for Excel.

They do everything I need, and they do it better than the new ones.

The strangest thing is that while new software continues to get worse, old software continues to get better (it runs faster and faster).

[samplatt]

If it (Excel) could only work with >64k rows, I'd never need to upgrade.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Sounds like you need a database and not a spreadsheet.

[samplatt]

If you can point me at a database that I can dynamically redimension at the drop of a hat for whatever different flavour of bullshit gets thrown at me this week, including the ability to easily identify content issues by sight, I'm all ears.

[dominicrose]

The newest Excel is really fine on many points to be fair. Startup performance is not the priority, but it's fine on a good machine.

It's true that software in general have grown in complexity. Some software pull giant trees of dependencies, because they can. As teams grow and time passes, mistakes are made...

[ninalanyon]

I wish that old versions of successful software were automatically open sourced.