I got a chuckle about your dad still running his C128 for financials. Their was a local optometrist here who ran his entire practice on Tandy Color Computers, networked together in a multi-tasking environment running OS9. Each and every part of it was custom written by the doctor. I think he retired a few years back, but I know it was still running his home brewed system then.
A local company I know of still runs under dos with a custom accounting software, still running on a memorex telex 286 pc, with a whopping 10mb hard-drive connected to a parallel port dot matrix printer, green crt and a mouse that would make anybody with RSI cringe just by looking at it.
The same setup has been used since the first eighties.
Data entry is so quick you can barely see the forms before the secretary presses enter and stuff gets printed (the slowest process by a huge margin).
Would put to shame most software I've seen nowdays.
AFAIK the system only uses 6mb of the 10 available and includes all accounting history of the company.
I doubt it was networked, as there was never a network card/cart/dongle or anything like that available for the CoCo back in the day (I owned both a CoCo 2 and a CoCo 3 as a kid, and still have both in running condition) - not even from 3rd parties, as far as I can remember.
There also was a system for the Model 4 (IIRC) running Xenix (?) with a serial port expander option to allow multiple system communicate with this "server", but that doesn't sound like what was done (?).
Radio Shack/Tandy sold a serial port switcher system that allowed you to connect multiple machines together in some fashion. It was meant for an educational setting (a teachers computer connected to multiple student machines). I don't believe it was automated in any way - completely manual. That doesn't sound like it was something that would work for an office setting.
In theory, you could mount a multipak interface and drop three serial pak cartridges in it, and maybe tweak the internal electronics to put them at different addresses, leaving the fourth slot open for the floppy drive (or maybe a hard drive). There would also be the bit-banger serial port available - so that would allow you to hang four machines off of a central "server"...third parties also created expanded multipak interfaces that allowed for many more cartridges to be attached (I think up to 16 in some cases).
Another way (which if this guy was doing this, he may have done) would be to create a completely custom networking system; the simplest way would be to use the bit-banger port and maybe the cassette port together (you might even be able to do something with the joystick ports too!) - the cassette port, using the relay latching, could toggle between "listen" (RX) and "send" (TX) modes, and with some simple electronics, the voltage levels could be managed and "collisions" detected, so you could do a "round robin" or even a "random" communication protocol with collision detection. Or, some other kind of "one-wire" communication system could be done. I also suppose someone really ambitious could create a custom bit of electronics and multiplex several UARTs together, linked to a single cartridge and controlled by the CoCo.
This is kinda fascinating; I wonder if he ever published anything about it. If not, it seems like another small bit of CoCo history lost forever, which is a shame.
I wonder if that kind of thing was more prevalent in the days of simpler computers, or if people are still doing the same thing on Windows/Linux/Mac these days.
Go on ebay, and search around for 386 motherboards, 5.25 floppy drives, and the like - for old DOS systems. Prices fluctuate, but on the whole some of those boards go for an insane amount of money (for what they are).
A lot of this is "collectibility" bumping prices up; but a part of it is also the fact that there are more than a few companies in the world running CNC tooling that uses these machines as controllers. We're talking CNC machines that to replace entirely would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (USD), if not more in some cases. So parts to repair and keep these machines running are in hot demand.
There are, though, a few companies out there taking a different approach: Since most of these systems are DOS based, they work to reverse engineer the controllers, and build custom Linux or other embedded systems, running DOSbox or some other emulator, to keep these machines alive. In some cases, a complete reverse-engineering is done (both hardware and software). There is a demand for it, and very few providers of this kind of service (some machines have little or no documentation on how they worked or were controlled, some have manuals in a foreign language, software is highly proprietary and dongle-ized, etc).
So for that case - for your question - yes, this is still done, and likely always will be. I'm sure there are other more "mundane" examples of people using old software on either new machines (say in a VM, or maybe if it runs, just on the new system) or using emulation. There are a few kinds of software where there is great trouble to be had trying to emulate it or such (either because of security dongles, or other custom hardware) - but if it can be done, it is likely to be done...
Hm I think you are answering a different question than what I was asking.
I was asking more that if any "smart non-programmers" like optometrists these days still write custom software to run their business? Or if in the era of Windows/Mac/Linux, it's too complicated to do so. The stack is too high, you have to remember version 0.8 of this or version 0.9 of that.
I assume he could do it with Tandy computers because things were simpler in those days.
To me, the appeal of programming was always to play god and make things exactly how you want them.
But more along the lines of what you're talking about, my former boss runs a retro-computing site/company, for example:
I like this. I've been writing code since the 80's and doing it professionally for decades.
I'll say this, Nothing is Easy Anymore.
By that, I mean writing code is easier than ever with the tools and capabilities available today. But you spend proportionately more time trying to fix those most obscure shit.
To quote Judas Priest:
You can hang a left, or hang a right.
The choice is yours to do as you might, but your just backseat driving if your hands ain't on the wheel.
I got a chuckle about your dad still running his C128 for financials. Their was a local optometrist here who ran his entire practice on Tandy Color Computers, networked together in a multi-tasking environment running OS9. Each and every part of it was custom written by the doctor. I think he retired a few years back, but I know it was still running his home brewed system then.