Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Ecco Pro on Amazon's VM

I never used Ecco Pro much, but I used a distant relative, MORE 3.1, very heavily. [1]

These were fantastic software products, usually coded in Pascal, C and maybe some C++. The extraordinary power of modern software platforms doesn't seem to translate into qualitatively better products -- in fact, few modern products have the reliability and performance of those old apps.

Incredibly Ecco Pro is still in use, twelve years after it was sunset ...
Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard -- Ecco in the cloud with Amazon

... Regular readers here know of my dependence on and infatuation with an ancient application called Ecco Pro. It’s the outliner I have used to run my life and write my books for years now. It has been an orphaned program since 1997 but it still runs beautifully on any Win-32 platform; it’s bulletproof and it’s fast....
It's also a testament to Microsoft that it still runs.

It's surprising enough that Ecco Pro is still around, but it get stranger. Rosenberg got it running on Amazon's VM service ...

[1] Ecco Pro was closer to GrandView, the DOS equivalent to MORE.

1 comment:

Friedhelm Dohmann said...

If you have a problem with newer operating systems CompuSol created a brand-new Windows EccoPro 32-bit installation package and a EccoPro 64-bit installation package for Vista and Windows 7. Both have fully automated Windows MSI installations which will create a desktop icon and allow you to ad or remove your EccoPro program. Both packages will install all necessary registry entries including the Palm conduits, the for Vista and Windows 7 necessary MS Help programs plus the "default.ect" template fix.