Some of it is, some isn't. My understanding is that some large institutions use "legacy systems" running stuff like COBOL which is more than a couple of decades old. I thought one of our own illustrious list members toiled in such vineyards.
Even if it's hardware specific, some hardware stays around for a while. For instance, I'm currently stuck with MS Excel/Access/Word 2002. Somewhere they may be a lot of recycled computers running Lotus 1-2-3 for all I know. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Carl Dassbach > Sent: 04:01 pm > To: Progressive Economics > Subject: Re: [Pen-l] "natural capital" > > Interesting question - is software timeless. Not really, or we would > and could be using software written for IBM machines of the 50s or CPM > machines of the early 1980s. Software, whether applications or > operating systems, is to a large measure specific to hardware. You can > not run CPM on a modern computer and I doubt if you could find a usable > CPM machine today, Conversely, one of the problems with Vista is that > it requires a hefty processor and lots of memory and so you can't even > run it on early Pentium machines. So, I would say that software isn't > timeless, it is historically and technologically specific. > > CHAD > > Doug Henwood wrote: > > > > On Apr 25, 2008, at 3:24 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > > > >> the main problem with seeing software as a type of capital good -- and > >> this applies to hardware, too, though to a lesser extent -- is that > >> software depreciates very quickly. > > > > Hardware, yeah, but software is theoretically timeless. That aside, > > it's conceptually a capital good, and not an intermediate good, as the > > NIPAs used to classify it. > > > > Doug > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > pen-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l >
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