Does the activation still work for these are do you have to use a hack to get them running? I still have a TON of older Office 2003 licenses, I'd love to go back. I've hated modern Office with the ribbon for half my life now.

The product keys still work. You can skip online activation. Only annoyance is needing to run once as admin to make the EULA acceptance write to the registry.

I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.

Please don't. There are so many unpatched exploits for old Office... opening any document could trash your whole system or silently steal information from you.

maybe so but that would imply the end user is opening sketchy files - most of the time these products are for low risk files

Just like a current Office does?

This was such a huge transition for FEM on x86-64. We went from UltraSPARC III 1.2GHz 24 CPU system with 128GB of RAM to a smaller Opteron two chassis cluster linked with Infiniband, 500GB 32core/8NUMA nodes per server, and the speedup was almost 10x.

I randomly came across a YouTube video [1] on the history of After Effects that I found really interesting. Seems as if there is quite a bit of evidence that the Nedry animation was done with an early preview.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQyhSI56gU