Left by the wayside.
It was within the framework of one of my jobs (and with a licensed version of the product) that a previous change of operating systems seemed to be the cause of the program not working. I clicked over to the program's website to check if a new version might perhaps be available (though I admit I had my doubts).
There I met an announcement that gave me a bit of the history of the product and company, and then let me know that from a particular date it had become an example of abandonware, and that I could still download the product if I wished, but that if it didn't work, it was my problem.
I was delighted with this new term, though a bit of searching informed me that it wasn't quite that new. The Wikipedia, for instance, defines abandonware as:
computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Alternately, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development has been deliberately discontinued.
and with my appetite whet, I searched for additional instances where the term
appears on the web, instances which turned out to be in the thousands. No longer
supported games seem to be a major percentage of abandonware, but numerous programs
for various tasks have earned the title as well, and there seem to be quite a
few people, not only archivists, who collect items of this sort.
For some reason, however, it seems that this phenomenon has only been examined
from the perspective of the developer. Nobody seems to have written about what
is undoubtedly very widespread among users - the vast amount of programs that
we no longer use. Of course there must be at least some computer users who are
able to remove these programs without any second thoughts, and even throw away
the disks (nobody needs to reformat and reuse those
disks anymore) but there's a decisiveness to doing that which seems to go
against a rather central aspect of computer use - that our ever-changing use of
programs is basically a one-step-at-a-time evolutionary
(or at least developmental) process rather than one characterized by sharp turns
and about-faces.
Go to: A task of the past, or
Go to: Tools I've known and loved ... and often abandoned.