Old Software

In my digital preservation class, a guest speaker (who gave a really interesting talk!) mentioned emulating Winamp on a website. I still use Winamp 2.71 as my default audio player. I got used to it a while back and have never found a need to change. Curious about how long ago 'a while back' was, I Googled and found that Winamp 2.71 is nearly 21 years old now. It was released in January of 2001. I tried Winamp 3 when it was released, but I didn't like something or other about it so I didn't update.

That's just a few months after Google's search engine left beta. I think I was primarily using a results aggregator called Dogpile for my searching at the time. I was probably running Windows 98 on my computers. Youtube wouldn't exist for several more years yet. My parents got DVDs through the mail via Netflix: it wouldn't turn into a streaming service for another six years.

Is it weird that this program still works? Is it just simple enough that all the backend OS changes from Windows 98 to Windows 10 don't affect it? Anyway, as long as it keeps working, it does everything I care about it doing (which is not much!) so I don't see a reason to change.

Winamp: still whipping the llama's ass 21 years later!

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Winamp Skin Museum - https://pcper.com/2020/10/remember-whipping-the-llamas-ass/