3 ms·

'even MS' MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs o

'even MS' MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs out there where you can start a 20 year old software and it runs almost always perfectly. (Try that on Linux or OSX.)

NegativeK 13y ago
I spin up xspringies[1] every once in a while to waste some time. It's well over 20 years old and runs like a charm. http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html
danielweber 13y ago
At Microsoft, if there is a design choice between "abandon the old user" or "let's forget them to make the current product better," they nearly always choose #1. Apple nearly always chooses #2. (I still remember DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.)
- laurent123456 13y ago
  You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are pretty much the same :)
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Sheesh, it made sense 5 hours ago!
dman 13y ago
In my mind that honor belongs to Sun with Solaris.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> Try that on Linux or OSX. On OS X that would certainly fail (even much software that's between 5-10 years old would fail) this test. But Linux provides a very stable ABI. 20-year backwards compatibility might be stretching it for Linux, since it's only around 20 years old to begin with. But if you have (e.g.) a statically linked Debian binary from the late 1990s, I'd bet almost anything it would still work on your desktop today.
npsimons 13y ago
How about 22 years? Specifically, see Alan Cox's comment about running a version of rogue compiled in 1992: https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8LKJk https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L... As for MS, my experience has been different. All too often, when trying to pull up old (mid-90's) Word documents, MS Office chokes, where Libre/OpenOffice chugs along just fine.

NegativeK 13y ago

I spin up xspringies[1] every once in a while to waste some time. It's well over 20 years old and runs like a charm. http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html

danielweber 13y ago

At Microsoft, if there is a design choice between "abandon the old user" or "let's forget them to make the current product better," they nearly always choose #1. Apple nearly always chooses #2. (I still remember DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.)

laurent123456 13y ago
You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are pretty much the same :)
- danielweber 13y ago
  Sheesh, it made sense 5 hours ago!

dman 13y ago

In my mind that honor belongs to Sun with Solaris.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> Try that on Linux or OSX. On OS X that would certainly fail (even much software that's between 5-10 years old would fail) this test. But Linux provides a very stable ABI. 20-year backwards compatibility might be stretching it for Linux, since it's only around 20 years old to begin with. But if you have (e.g.) a statically linked Debian binary from the late 1990s, I'd bet almost anything it would still work on your desktop today.

npsimons 13y ago

How about 22 years? Specifically, see Alan Cox's comment about running a version of rogue compiled in 1992: https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8LKJk https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L... As for MS, my experience has been different. All too often, when trying to pull up old (mid-90's) Word documents, MS Office chokes, where Libre/OpenOffice chugs along just fine.