But nostalgia fades when you remember the security nightmares.

The "Commenting" tool was a marvel of passive aggression. You could use sticky notes, text boxes, or—if you really hated your coworkers—the Audio Comment tool. Imagine receiving a 40-page engineering schematic, only to find a little speaker icon in the corner that plays your boss whispering, “This is wrong. Fix it.” Modern Acrobat (the DC and Pro 202x versions) is a subscription service. It nags you to save to the cloud. It phones home every ten seconds. It’s a browser in a trench coat.

But if you dig up an old Windows XP laptop in a basement, fire up Acrobat 9 Pro, and hear that hard drive churn as you combine five different file types into a 200MB PDF, you’ll feel it: the raw, unchecked power of a time when software did exactly what you told it to—even if what you told it to do was very, very stupid. Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 Pro

Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 Pro Direct

But nostalgia fades when you remember the security nightmares.

The "Commenting" tool was a marvel of passive aggression. You could use sticky notes, text boxes, or—if you really hated your coworkers—the Audio Comment tool. Imagine receiving a 40-page engineering schematic, only to find a little speaker icon in the corner that plays your boss whispering, “This is wrong. Fix it.” Modern Acrobat (the DC and Pro 202x versions) is a subscription service. It nags you to save to the cloud. It phones home every ten seconds. It’s a browser in a trench coat.

But if you dig up an old Windows XP laptop in a basement, fire up Acrobat 9 Pro, and hear that hard drive churn as you combine five different file types into a 200MB PDF, you’ll feel it: the raw, unchecked power of a time when software did exactly what you told it to—even if what you told it to do was very, very stupid.