Talk:Cardfile

Cancellation
Why doesn't Microsoft include Cardfile with current versions of Windows? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wrcousert (talk • contribs) 20:18, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Just a guess, but probably because PDAs, such as the PalmPilot, beat the socks off Cardfile. PDAs can be carried along in one's pocket, synchronized and backed up on an office computer.  Cardfile only exists on the office computer.  Later implementations of PDAs and their associated desktop software offered far more functions and versatility. Microsoft was also getting competition from the likes of Micro Logic's Info Select, which was orders of magnitude faster in finding and retrieving information. &mdash;QuicksilverT @ 01:57, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, but it wouldn't have hurt to leave it in anyway. Today cards could be saved on OneDrive. Doug Ewell (talk) 18:51, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Another version of Cardfile?
My version of Cardfile is the 91K version but is timestamped March 10, 1992, 4:10 AM. (In case you're wondering, it's from the Packard Bell Multimedia Master CD that came with my computer back in the days when people used Windows 3.1.) Crystallina 02:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Excellent Additions!
Thanks for the screen shot, great idea!

This isn't the first time I've heard of different versions of Cardfile that weren't on the Windows diskettes or CD, I think they deserve to be included in the article. Perhaps you could edit the Version Information section and add that data in some meaningful way? I'll try to find the version I ran across that wasn't MS-distributed and add it, too. Sperry? Hewlett-Packard? Estople 03:49, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

DOS Version?
Anyone remember the DOS version that came w/ QuickBasic 4.5, or was it VisualBasic for DOS 1.0? Might be an interesting tidbit. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.191.17.168 (talk) 02:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC).

Added More Versions
The versions in Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups 3.1, 3.11 and Windows 98, ME are all identical. Likewise, all of the 32-bit versions (NT3.1, 3.50, 3.51) make a second version. I've added the sizes of the assorted platforms that Win351 was released in, i presume these are the same for 3.10/3.50 as well. All of these are verified from the source disk collections.

One has also Win-OS/2. Cardfile is included from version 2.1 onwards, and is a different recompile from the same source code to Microsoft's versions.

An OS/2 version of cardfile (being a port of the Win30 version), exists in the WLO. The dos 6 expand command will unpack this file.

Wendy.krieger 08:28, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

“Unicode bugs”
The article states:

"[...] many operating systems (such as NT and NeXT) assumed that one Unicode character was equivalent to two bytes, but this assumption is now wrong. Therefore, users of the NT 3.51 version of Cardfile on newer versions of Windows will encounter Unicode bugs and these bugs cannot be fixed due to the way the file format was defined."

The phrase “Unicode bugs” is misleading. As stated, the issue is that Cardfile under Windows NT 3.51 used UCS-2 instead of UTF-16. This means it did not support characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, but instead treated what are now surrogate code points as separate characters. UCS-2 is an obsolete encoding, but it is not a “Unicode bug” and the lack of UTF-16 support does not mean users will encounter unspecified “Unicode bugs,” only that non-BMP characters are not supported.

It is also not true that the lack of support for supplementary characters “cannot be fixed due to the way the file format was defined.” The Cardfile application could have been updated to handle surrogates properly, with no change in the UCS-2–based file format, but at the possible expense of a reduction in card capacity of up to 50%.

I'll make the appropriate changes to the article in a month or so. Doug Ewell (talk) 18:48, 7 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Done.  WurmWoode  T   20:48, 23 March 2018 (UTC)