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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

I have applications and games from the 90s that still work in Windows 10. The idea that developers have have to constantly push updates is unproductive in my opinion.

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A ton of software from that era stopped working when XP was released. For instance storing settings in an application's installation folder was common until Microsoft stopped it. Anything that ran as a service but interacted with the desktop was out of luck. This idea that everything from that period continues to run is a myth.

I never said everything. But a lot of the software still works. Some work with minor workarounds. Of course some programs will break with an update. But in my opinion creating a culture where an update is expected for software that is a couple of months old at best is really unhealthy.

no? all these things are just a couple configuration away from working.

the real things that were dropped since then were 32 bit protected mode apps, and for such you have plenty options for both virtualizing and paravirtualizing.

I can boot basically any other version of Windows under my windows system using Microsoft provided software.

I can even just go boot up older version of Windows on current hardware if needed be, up to a point.

almost everything from eighties to today I am able to run one way another, nothing "stopped" working.

Apple physically removes old software from their delivery platform or signing servers and if you lose your devices it's lost forever

how does it even compare?

That's a decision made by Microsoft which has pros and cons. There's significant overhead in maintaining this backwards compatibility. For an OS used by corporations all over the world, its worth it. For a mobile OS it will likely reduce their ability to deliver changes.

I agree, I think a lot of what holds Windows back is the baggage from the past. Ideally OSes would live somewhere in a healthy middle, where we can’t expect 10 year old software to run on the current version of an OS. On the other hand we should expect 1 month old software to run on after an OS update.

Apple used to give a shit there. They did a bunch of extra work so you could run OS9 apps under OSX for a few years, and they did an amazing job of making 68000 code run on PowerPC...

Wait until you see Rosetta.

Until you read Raymond Chen’s blog about all of the hacks that have been built up for the sake of backwards compatibility or try to run Windows on a low resource computer like the low end Surface computers and can’t because of code bloat.

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