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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

>Saying that a document from the early web is still viewable while a fully interactive application from the same time is not is a bit disingenuous.

Indeed, though running a Java Applet from 1995 is a lot easier than running an iOS app from 2010. Although browsers haven’t natively supported Applets for a very long time, there are several third-party tools that let you run them as standalone applications. Good luck virtualizing a 10 year old version of iOS to do the same for the old app.

That said, the argument in the OP holds true if we don’t go back in time quite as far. Most JavaScript-based single-page applications from 2010 should still run flawlessly in modern browsers.

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I discovered this unfortunate reality recently myself. In 2012 I was gifted by my parents a first gen Kindle Fire. I got a lot of free apps back then because Amazon had a "free game of the week" deal going on where a lot of normally paid apps would be temporarily free.

Out of nostalgia I downloaded the Amazon App Store to my phone last month and found that not only were most of my favorite apps not in my library anymore, but that the few left over were built for a version of Android so old that it is no longer compatible with my phone. It was a very sad moment for me, as I had a lot of fun with those games

As a hobbyist game developer with several games of my own no longer available due to the marching on of OS versions, I sympathize. There just isn't enough time or incentive for me to keep old codebases current with arbitrary API changes.

I wish Android had a compatibility layer, along with some sandboxing measures to keep security threats from being too serious. That way old programs can still stick around, and leave more time for devs to focus on new programs instead of maintaining old ones.

This is why it's important to oppose the ambitions of people who pose the threat of making their way into influential positions at browser makers and arguing that it's okay to throw the whole thing out the window and start treating browser-based app development like any other platform. There is no other platform like the Web.

Previously:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28056416>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368152>

>iOS app from 2010

Isn't this an Apple thing? Seems like you should still be able to find and run old Android VMs. They ship with the SDK unless they retroactively pulled them.

> Indeed, though running a Java Applet from 1995 is a lot easier than running an iOS app from 2010

Applets weren’t even easy to run in 1995.

But somehow still way easier than booting up an old iOS.

> Most JavaScript-based single-page applications from 2010 should still run flawlessly in modern browsers.

If they're purely client-side, sure, but there's a good chance that anything we could reasonably call a web application, also has a backend component on a server. How confident are we that the backend code from 1995 will still run?

1995 is when Microsoft Frontpage launched. PHP was a year old. I'd be surprised if anything written in those sorts of environments still functions without being run on a 1995 version of Windows/Linux on 1995 era hardware.

Software is a process, it always has been, it always will be.

> How confident are we that the backend code from 1995 will still run?

This seems like it would apply equally to native and web.

You can run pretty much any native app from 1995 for any platform in emulation. Network requirements were uncommon outside of networking-specific apps.

You can render a web page from 1995 but you can’t run any server-side logic if you don’t have a copy of the server.

Honestly I think Perl CGI scripts stand a better than most chance of still being executable 25 years later. Maybe just behind win32 apps. Whether you'd want to with the high rate of command/sql/html injection vulnerabilities in those days is another question.

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