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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

I was impressed when I upgraded an old Win7 system and Office 2007 still worked on W10. Makes me wonder what the oldest version of Office is that would still work. There are a lot of things to not like about Microsoft, but their dedication to backwards compatibility is great.

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Reminds me of that time when they fixed a buffer overflow in the ancient Office Equation Editor by manually patching the binary because they lost the source code:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-patches-eq...

Wow, that's impressive.

Are are more explanations for the manual patch than losing the source code though: why spend days/weeks setting up a 20-year old dev and build environment when a two-byte patch does the trick?

Oh that reminds me of learning some assembler by writing cracks to shareware programs to patch away test period warnings, license key checks, etc. using a disassembler (w32dasm I believe) on the binary executable. That was a fun learning experience, helped a 14 year old to use software he otherwise couldn't buy (me) and helped understanding quite a few internals of binaries.

Some binaries are obfuscated by overlapping several routines together.

Oh, there's a bunch of ways you can try to make reverse engineering harder, but I don't think these techniques are really that common for most software.

It’s worth noting that a patch around 2 months later removed the Equation Editor entirely, because more security issues were found and binary patching wasn’t going to be sufficient.

Has its downsides, though - one of the reasons Active Directory has been (and still is) so insecure out of the box is backwards compatibility with an ecosystem of shitty third party vendor solutions.

Sometimes, change is good, even if it's painful in the short term.

I'm sure. I still much prefer Microsoft's model over Apple's, even if there are some drawbacks.

What actually impresses me there isn't that Office 2007 is still compatible with Windows 10 (I mean it does impress me, but I'm used to it by now), but rather the fact that a program like office doesn't break after an upgrade -- and I mean that from the perspective of the OS upgrade. Upgrading the whole OS underneath my programs and having them still work fine is just not something I ever expect on any OS, and it was quite unexpected the first time I saw it happen on Windows.

You should try to upgrade a Linux machine. Not only keeps working before the upgrade. It allows you to WORK meanwhile the whole OS is upgrading!

Shit! I was playing Stellaris meanwhile I was updating to Kubuntu 18.10

Sure, sometimes, maybe. But pretty much only if you've only ever used software from the main repo and of course not anything they've dropped between versions. I've had plenty of Linux upgrades break stuff. Not just programs, but core functionality. Linux Desktop has pretty much the opposite compatibility story to Windows.

> You should try to upgrade a Linux machine.

I have!

> Not only keeps working before the upgrade. It allows you to WORK meanwhile the whole OS is upgrading!

Yeah, and then it breaks and trashes my install after the upgrade. Happened to me many times.

Yeah, then you reboot and find out what's really broken. About 30% of the time there's some weird problem. Last time, my Nvidia drivers weren't upgraded and my laptop's external display stopped working.

Server upgrades are usually smooth (early versions of Ubuntu being an exception.)

I agree, that's impressive, but... every time I upgrade, and even some substantial portion of non-upgrade updates, I have to go in and fix my Grub config or else my Windows dual boot just infinite loops. That's somewhat less impressive, and it affects me much more substantially.

The more immediate usability issues mean that I have a clear divide between the OSes I prefer to use for my daily driver (OSX/Windows) vs. the OSes I prefer to use for servers (Linux). With WSL2, the virtualization capabilities are good enough that I pretty much never need to explicitly boot Linux on my laptop/desktop anymore.

> I have to go in and fix my Grub config or else my Windows dual boot just infinite loops

My limited experience with Windows dual boot, shitty Windows issues or Bios caused problems.

Do you have a good reason to blame Linux here?

The problem is consistently fixed by an edit to grub.conf to invoke ntldr explicitly. It's a fairly well documented issue: https://askubuntu.com/questions/725290/grub-windows-10-doesn...

Of course it's still possible that on my particular configuration it's actually Windows doing something dumb that makes grub.conf changes necessary. However, it's (1) well documented for years, (2) an issue that the Linux (distro) installer creates, and (3) an issue that still gets recreated on every update that mysteriously reverts my grub.conf changes, so Windows gets the benefit of the doubt and Linux doesn't.

That's been my experience in general with desktop Linux: I have never experienced a Linux distro where I didn't have to get into the weeds to fix up a clean install, even when Linux is the only OS on the system.

Ok. I set up a Dell XPS15 with dual-boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 plus some XPS15 "fixes".

I only booted into Windows a couple of times (to keep it up to date) but I never ran into any problems with dual booting.

Ubuntu has its problems, especially Gnome works but I hate it's dumbdown, also high density screens work but have issues.

I still far prefer Linux to Windows.

I think I still have an old copy of Office 95 at home. Gotta try that with Win10 just for shits and giggles...

Report back, I'd love to know.

Works just fine. It's legitimately the setup everyone at my house uses (except for me). We have a legit license for it, and it works just fine, so why not

I have Office 2002 on my Windows 10 desktop. I don't use them often, but Word and Excel still work. The only issue (I can't remember if this affected me on older windows versions) is that it sometimes crashes when you close it and tries to restart.

You say it nonchalantly but I'd think twice if it wouldn't work anymore if I'd upgrade (at all). Buying new full versions of Office is not very cheap.

You shouldn't be impressed that existing apps continue to work, since that's the norm for Microsoft. It's all the other things they changed around and the subtly added "telemetry" spyware that should get your attention more. ;-)

Office 95 can run on Win10, with only a little difficulty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE

> It's all the other things they changed around and the subtly added "telemetry" spyware that should get your attention more. ;-)

As if that isn't already discussed to death around here or elsewhere. I see far more disdain for Microsoft than I do any praise at all. And while I'm not particularly happy with Microsoft either, I'm still able to appreciate the good things that they do.

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