Submission + - Slowbooks, AI coded cleanroom re-imagined Quickbooks (github.com)
Archangel Michael writes: The Story
VonHoltenCodes ran QuickBooks 2003 Pro for 14 years for side business invoicing and bookkeeping. Then the hard drive died. Intuit's activation servers have been dead since ~2017, so the software can't be reinstalled. The license paid for is worthless.
So he built his own replacement, transferred all his data from the old .QBW file using IIF export/import.
The codebase is annotated with "decompilation" comments referencing QBW32.EXE offsets, Btrieve table layouts, and MFC class names — a tribute to the software that served him well for 14 years before its maker decided it should stop working.
This is a clean-room reimplementation. No Intuit source code was available or used.
(Side Note from story submitter. This is the beginning of the end of Windows only applications)
VonHoltenCodes ran QuickBooks 2003 Pro for 14 years for side business invoicing and bookkeeping. Then the hard drive died. Intuit's activation servers have been dead since ~2017, so the software can't be reinstalled. The license paid for is worthless.
So he built his own replacement, transferred all his data from the old
The codebase is annotated with "decompilation" comments referencing QBW32.EXE offsets, Btrieve table layouts, and MFC class names — a tribute to the software that served him well for 14 years before its maker decided it should stop working.
This is a clean-room reimplementation. No Intuit source code was available or used.
(Side Note from story submitter. This is the beginning of the end of Windows only applications)
