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Comment by addled | Hacker News Reader

One of my crowning achievements(?) was using DOSbox for actual work purposes.

In 2010-14 I worked at large retailer that still did almost half their development in RPG running on IBM iSeries.

Part of onboarding for new devs was this series of training software modules that went over the fundamentals of the RPG language. It was boring, but very thorough. It clearly had been purchased in the late 90s and kept in use since not much had really changed.

I think it was with Windows 8 that it finally stopped working. My supervisor, in charge of intern program, started stressing after none of the built-in compatibility options worked.

I immediately thought of DOSbox, and sure enough, it worked like a charm. For the next couple years I was there, one of the first things all new devs did was install DOSbox and it gave me a smile every time.

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I have a DOSbox story as well. A customer requested an emergency change to some firmware that was built for an old 8051-based platform. We had a single instance of the compiler from [redacted] available on a PC that was left in a closet for a decade or so.

The compiler maker was still in business but wanted 15 years of extortion-level "retroactive support" payments to let us move the license to a newer machine, and I could hear the old one about to fail. Thankfully the protection scheme was the old type that locked the compiler to the MAC address of the host PC.

We copied the compiler over to a DOSbox instance and spoofed the MAC. Worked like a charm.

Good for an emergency, but I'd make sure to calmly move to an open 8051 compiler.

Because screw that awful vendor.

Why? Moving your project to another compiler for a one time change is creating needless work and potentially opening a new can of worms you don't want to deal with.

If you have something battle tested and you know it works then just stick with it especially that now you got the vendor out of the loop.

Porting was the backup plan but time was of the essence, so the hack worked. Validation of brand new object code would have been a huge pain. But yeah, I would Assume that Renewing the license would have killed the project.

Did this retailer start with an "O"? Ran into a similar situation myself

Shouldn't large enterprises requiring DOS go for a virtual machine instead?

Why? Performance reasons?

Can you tell me what RPG is? I assume a language that runs on mainframes??

Report Program Generator, an IBM language from 1959 designed as an alternative to using punch cards.

From a glance ... unlike COBOL which was invented in the same year, it does not seem to be widely hated - possibly it's even well-liked. But since it is a proprietary language exclusive to IBM it is quite unfamiliar outside their silo.

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