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I'm reminded of a story told by Joel Sposky about Simcity on Windows 95. The DOS/Win3.x version of SimCity had a bug where it used memory after freeing it, whi
by cecilpl2 5y ago
I'm reminded of a story told by Joel Sposky about Simcity on Windows 95.
The DOS/Win3.x version of SimCity had a bug where it used memory after freeing it, which worked fine on DOS since the memory didn't get reallocated. The Windows 95 team found that it was broken, and so they added code to detect whether SimCity was running, and if so ran the memory manager in a special mode that didn't release memory immediately.
- skeeter2020 5y agopeople love to credit MS's success to their ruthless monopolistic practices and there is truth to that, but they've also (a) treated developers very well and (b) put tremendous effort into backwards compatibility. Neither of these are trivial but I don't think there's another player out there who has done this as well.