Unlocking NetWare 2.0a | Hacker News Reader

Unlocking NetWare 2.0a

os2museum.com

71 pointsingve10 comments

Happy these disks turned up. Cracking this old software luckily is rather easy. Only when I watched the latest NCommander video did I learn that most of the old Cray software is lost to time and while emulators exist, you can't do much with them.

I wonder if modern, cloud-dependent software and hardware can be made to work 40 years from now. Cracking all those encryption keys and whatnot might be much more involved. My go-to example is Windows Phone. Bootloader unlocking and modifying the image is possible but somewhat wonky depending on model. A stock WP 8.1 is completely useless today, as you can't get past the setup screen that wants you to login with a Microsoft account via some service that's not available anymore.

If you still have a phone that's already registered, you will find the weather app not working, calendar sync not working, translator not being able to translate or download offline packages, bing maps not being able to download offline packages, the list goes on. These things can't even be fixed on the device itself, one had to reverse engineer the apps and reimplement those services. It might very well be that all that's left from these devices in a few decades is those couple of seconds of B-roll in YouTube reviews – if someone bothered to save them.

In a recent attack of nostalgia, I attempted to try and get SuSE Linux 7.0 running in a virtual machine, the first GNU/Linux distro I ever used. I could not find a an emulator and combination of settings that would run the system in a useful manner and gave up after a few hours. IIRC, the main problem was the graphics card, because I did not want to be stuck at 640x480 at 16 colors or something. :(

I've been having similar issues with Windows 3.11; trying to boot a qemu image I made a few years back and it looks like networking has died in the meantime, and another image crashes when it exceeds some small amount of RAM usage. But at least there's nothing stopping us from running an older linux in qemu to easily use an older qemu version that way, avoiding the hassle of having to patch the source to work with recent versions of its dependencies.

You could try bochs. It's a full-blown emulator and probably much slower, but it might do a better job at giving 1990s software a comfortable environment.

I haven’t tried it, but apparently DosBox-X can run Windows 3.1…

https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3AInstalling-Windows-3.1x

Actually, an old friend of mine works on long term archival of computing environments, and they still use a patched version of qemu 2.0 (iirc) for older systems for these reasons.

Try PCem. It provides emulation of enough processors, video cards, sound cards, network cards, and peripherals that something is bound to work.

Mainstream virtual machines only support a couple. In many cases, it's some virtual hardware spec that they created.

Emulators like PCem or 86box are what you want for these old systems, not virtual machines.

I mean, if by cloud-dependent software you mean software usually running in the cloud, then it's a non issue since most software also runs on single nodes. If you mean SaaS stuff - well, the problem isn't 40 years from now. It's when the company sunsets product X or if they go bankrupt.

> well, the problem isn't 40 years from now. It's when the company sunsets product X or if they go bankrupt.

Sure, but one of those is almost sure to happen in 40 years. Whereas this 40 year old software was able to be revived.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com