4 ms·

Linux and OSX have had a number of ways to pull this off for ages. I don't really consider the idea the MS is doing this on their own stack a big surprise. Wha

by mpk 17y ago

Linux and OSX have had a number of ways to pull this off for ages. I don't really consider the idea the MS is doing this on their own stack a big surprise. What still surprises me is that it took the Open Source community to provide full DOS execution on modern systems by means of DOSBox (which basically emulates a DOS era x86 system) instead of the hack-it-up route MS took for Win95 and pretty much abandoned on the road to XP. Contrast that with other companies (say, IBM and SUN) which have binary compatibility going back to the early 80s and beyond..

briansmith 17y ago
Windows XP still supports 16-bit Windows 3.x applications. Sun's backward compatibility guarantee goes back to SPARC7 (circa 1987) which was already 32-bit. Windows 3.0 was 16-bit and was released in 1990. I don't know about IBM but I imagine the situation is similar. Linus didn't even start Linux until 1991. Desktop Mac OS X was released in 2001. Microsoft's compatibility achievement there is much more impressive to me. AFAICT, the primary reason for this compatibility mode is to run IE6 side-by-side with IE8, so that corporations don't have to upgrade their web apps all at once. Neither Linux nor Mac OS X offers that feature for free; you can virtualize XP in Linux and Mac OS X but you don't get a free XP license with them.