Back in the day, or many moons ago...

It was actually 11 years ago, I refused to package Microsoft Access 97, claiming it to be socially irresponsible. Since I was the leader of a decent sized team, I could pull rank and get one of the team to do it. But I refused, taking the moral high ground.

I keep harking back to this story, I try and explain to people why I did it then and why I do it now. Don't get me wrong, I am a packager, I get paid to package! So I shouldn't really argue, just package.... but I don't. (Ironically 4 years later I had the same discussion about Microsoft Access 97, passed it of to my junior, then 4 months later, no exaggeration I promise, the client asked for Access 2.0, another job for the junior....)

I do a lot of migrations, I love the idea of making everything new and shiny.

If you are going to spend all that money on new hardware and a new OS, why not spend a little bit more money and update the 'other apps' (I understand there are some budget constraints).
Now days I find myself doing a lot of smaller migrations, with pretty aggressive timescales, most are between 100 and 250 apps. Not massive by any means. Because they are small projects I don't have such a large team, normally 1 or 1.5 packagers,  in the last 10 years I have had to package Access 97 about 4 times, and today, on the back end of 2014, I have been asked to package......

Oracle 8i.

Unfortunately I have been brought in just to do this, so I have no option to push this to someone else. The buck stops here.

But interestingly enough, there was an installer for Adobe Reader 3. A 3.5 MB setup.exe, with an install footprint of 5.5 MB. Took a surprisingly long time to install. The good news, I didn't have to package it. I was just having a little bit of a mental break to see just how small it was 'back in the day'.

FYI, that was a much older Adobe Reader version that I am used to, when I started packaging, it was already in MSI format.