Announcing the Sunset for DC-3 Dreams

Hi Everyone --

At today's Society for Astronomical Sciences meeting, we announced that DC-3 Dreams will cease sales of our software and tech support subscriptions as of July 1. That's my 79th birthday. I will continue to fulfill the 1 year's tech support that comes with each license until my 80th birthday, next July 1 (2026). I won't be making any new versions though, so the features are what they are today.

It has been a heck of a run! You all have been such great customers, and I know I'll miss the interaction and problem solving.

-- Bob Denny

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Hi Bob and Stephanie,


I'm certainly not the only one who dreaded this announcement, but retiring at 80 is absolutely magnificent. I would like to express my gratitude for your constant help, goodwill, and good humor. It has been a real pleasure to share this adventure for over a decade.

Wishing you, in advance, a very happy and well-deserved retirement,
Stéphane

Stéphane --

Thank you so much Stéphane. Of course, the software won't stop working unless Microsoft invalidates something. They have been magnificent in keeping compatibility over the years!!

Thanks again,

-- Bob

Congratulations, Bob and Stevie, on a well-earned retirement!

Thank you for what you have done! I sincerely wish you and your wife a great retirement!

// Niklas

ps. Do you have any plan to put the code in public domain? ds

Hi Bob, just wanted to thank you for a great suite of products and first-class support over the years.

Wishing you and Stephanie a long and happy retirement!

Peter

Hi Bob and Stephanie,

I also wanted to thank you for providing and supporting the beautiful and wonderful software.
I will definitely want to keep using ACP until my retirement (I need to terminate the Windows
update to make ACP working for another 10 years) to achieve my scientific goal.
Thanks again for your great support.

Regards,
Taka

What a beautiful couple! Inside and out. Many thanks for all your efforts that kept my observatory functioning for 10 years at least, supporting my asteroid studies, and allowing me a good night's sleep throughout it all. ACP and Scheduler made my dreams come to fruition. And thanks to Stevie for making the business run smoothly. Better friends than Bob and Stevie cannot be found. Thank you, thank you THANK YOU!

Now on to the next phase of your lives. Enjoy it to the fullest.

With all my regards to you both,
Larry Owings

Thank you everyone!!! I do appreciate the kind words.

I want to respond to some requests:

I am not going to put the software into Open Source. I would create a forever obligation to train people on how to build the pieces, how it integrates with obscure Windows technologies like Windows Script, helping people learn how to build my ports of CFITSIO, Sextractor, and the monster CLAPACK, as used in PinPoint, and set up the tooling for this. Plus the OEM web serving engine on which so much of ACP's user interface depends is licensed software. There are multiple tricky COM/ActiveX engines which I developed and which require Active Template Library and crazy coding hacks. This a is a lost art. More importantly, ACP.exe is itself a Visual Basic 6 program, another lost art. I'm unsure the VB6 Integrated Development will even run on Windows 11. It's to Microsoft's credit that they have continued to support the legacy technology on which all of this is built into Windows 11. You may have noticed that the ACP.EXE acts as a Windows Script Host itself, fully integrating with Visual Studio 2022's symbolic debugger, to give you full inspect/change script debugging with ACP's Javascript and VBScript, Windows Script Components (AcquireSupport library), as well as the code within ACP's Active Server Pages feature (not using the Microsoft ASP engine, this one I wrote within ACP.exe in VB6 and an ActiveX component that ties that into the Windows Script API.

I hope you'll understand.

So please enjoy the software as it is with no time limits. Of course Microsoft could decide to sunset legacy technologies which would prevent ACP from working, but they have a giant legacy user base and have been incredibly good at keeping things stable, even for Visual Basic 6.

Wow, Larry that's so nice. I consider you one of my "best friends" !!!