Trouble Shooting Installation of DCALC Updates on Windows 7 and Windows 8:
When installing updates to a computer with Windows 7 or Windows 8, we have found from experience that the
update files cannot be unzipped directly into the DCALC directory. This difficulty be due to security settings in the operating system that prevent unzipping files into certain folders.
When installing DCALC updates please go throught the following steps:
1. First unzip all the DCALC update files to a temporary directory.
2. Then, using Windows Explorer, "COPY and REPLACE" all those files into the proper DCALC directory, overwriting the previous files.
A Perspective About Operating Systems:
Over the years, while we've been busy keeping up with structural engineering codes, Microsoft has also been busy changing operating systems. DCALC was originally a DOS program, written using QuickBasic linked to assembly language routines. It was later rewritten using Visual Basic 6 (VB6) for the Windows 98 operating system. In the transistion to Windows XP, no issues were encountered. However, the transistion to Windows 7 did create issues for installing the update files. We have found from experience that the above installation steps are successful.
According to some accounts, there are currently 6 million professional VB6 programmers in the world! (reference cited) The popularity of Visual Basic 6 has resulted in applications that remain in active use today. To paraphrase one VB6 programmer, "It doesn't make much sense to rip-up the tracks of an entire railroad system and rebuild from scratch". VB6 seems to keep going and going,....
From our perspective, it appears that Microsoft's operating systems have retained essentially the same basic features since Windows 98, and that many of the "advances" in operating systems are driven by Internet and mobile phone purposes. To put it bluntly, DCALC is intended for "number crunching", not social media. Many businesses rely on specially written proprietary software written in VB6 which they cannot rewrite. A program such as DCALC is extremely complicated, currently with over 300 files!
"So far, so good". DCALC seems to work fine on Windows 7 and Windows 8, once installed.