[malandrew]

I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.

[batoure]

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up.

And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

[malandrew]

What does she use VMware for?

[batoure]

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

[insaneirish]

For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!

[voltagex_]

Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure:

* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)

* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows

* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM

* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows

* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes

* printed from DOSBox and got [2]

1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)

2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...

[batoure]

I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.

[voltagex_]

The file format looks whacky but not impossible to parse.

Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.

[voltagex_]

Is there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.

[malandrew]

Connections like these are why HN is amazeballs. You can make a simple comment and someone here will have a technical interest in helping you out.

[voltagex_]

Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.

[batoure]

I could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to.

edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.