Since even moi can follow this decidedly Renaissance dance.. (a gavotte, perhaps?) query:
By '98, wasn't it established contract practice to insist upon a escrowed copy of source, in the event of the biz implosion of the seller? I mean - surely You wouldn't have missed including that clause.

Ah yes dongles.. I recall one for an icky so-called Multi-language Word Processor. As I recall, the dongle was tamper-resistant - even physically, so my curiosity was unassuaged.

Assuming [??] that they burned a ROM and not an EPROM: Tek scopes experience suggests that only rarely do old ROMS lose their burned-diode bits: but.. they can; more often, chemical things happening to the bonding wires and even legs of the IC are the culprit.

Now you already know about yer more complexificated EEPROMS - and their failure mechanisms are more imaginitive. I dunno about those.. except that it usually takes a higher voltage/current source [or spike] than the PS bus, to confound such.

(I presume you have an epoxied-on label on that dongle, saying: "Don't even TOUCH this device, before calling and REACHING ____ to hear exactly why you want to." ??)




Whenever I read these hilarious stories, I always wonder - - What If All. That. Clever. WORK would have been dedicated to something with a quite grander aim than ___? :-/

Clear language problem in the laughable efforts at 'help' (see, you'd Never have done something like That); minimal drivers for a couple or so, dot-matrix printers.. fortunately gotten on eval and returned.

Can't even recall time-frame now - early/mid '90s. Maybe yours would have been the keeper, but IIRC my friend ended up, much later, with Word6 add-ins to do the necessaries - while learning about fonts, type-faces and all that Stuff.

(And ~that stage, my first momentary immersion in industrial-strength Unix - to help with the sending/receiving of that-all, a long way across the nascent 'net' via Pine: Hey, we Won, too! Got props from the IT guys who'd missed the simplicity of teachin folks to make at least minimalist use of their assigned /Home repository, back there at IU. Loved. It. Our scheme worked for the local Macs, too..)

So then, how's come your group didn't CYA on the source for this indispensable moribund ap?


But moving right on back in time -
Me.. I truly MISS Tornado Notes! and the philosophy behind it.. never could wade through Info Select's (though verra nicely-done) Overkill; that plus the probability of repeated Doze-style 'up'grades into whatever next formats / conversions.

Hmmmm.. something Tornado-like for *nix out there?
What a great thing to run on minimalist Puppy Linux!
Instant free-form db for non-dbers, for us legions who shall never construct a sorting algorithm. Dedicate an ancient laptop to it? free some neurons.


Ashton