4 ms·

MS-DOS ain't done...

• Stratoscope 13y ago
  ...until Lotus won't run. It's a cute saying, but almost certainly apocryphal: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done... Microsoft has always put a lot of work into keeping applications running in new OS versions. Raymond Chen has chronicled these efforts over the years in his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ Many of the compatibility problems have been from apps that used undocumented features or APIs, or made bad assumptions about APIs. So Microsoft has put in compatibility shims and workarounds to keep these apps running. Every time Raymond describes one of these hacks, there are comments about how they're just adding cruft and bloating Windows, and even worse they're encouraging developers to be lazy or overly clever, and they should just let the apps break so people won't do that. His reply is always the same: when a customer upgrades Windows and their apps break, they don't blame the app, they blame Windows. Of course something did break here. Nobody's perfect.