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Looking forward to someone doing the same sort of thing with other OSs.
In Ubuntu, it would be one long series of do-release-upgrade commands. Not nearly as exciting.
I wouldn't mind seeing the same video idea with Ubuntu. Somehow I don't think it will be long before a copycat does this :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Try running a 16-bit application on Windows x64... There's no reason for this to fail: dosemu runs 16-bit code on 64-bit Linux systems just fine. You just need to do full hardware emulation which, at this point, is neither difficult nor prohibitively resource-intensive.
There's actually a very specific reason for it to fail. There's an unfixable bug in the way that the Windows emulates 16-bit BIOS calls in the 8086 mode monitor. This is specific to Microsoft's implementation and is (if I remember correctly) an architectural issue (and not the only one). The options are rewrite an emulator or ditch 16-bit support in 64-bit. I'm not saying that this is the only reason, but it is one.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much more than you would ever know.. The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated. In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating system allocate…
I also remember that there was a version of that rather than sending LVM_GETITEMTEXT would just read the ansi characters corresponding to the selected item during LVN_ITEMCHANGED off of a random location in the stack frame that they had "noticed" held the value. Of course, this eventually changed to a unicode string internally and broke WinZip... so the code that fired off this event would convert the unicode string…
Impressive, but I have to wonder how many compromises had to be made, and advancements abandoned, to keep apps like Reversi and Dosshell all the way up through Win7...
Good point, but consider all those old business apps that can continue to run in small companies all over the world.
He applauds MS for continually supporting their legacy software... my opinion is that such legacy support is what continually hampers their rapid development
When it comes to viability as an infrastructure for business, downwards compatibility clearly trumps rapid development. The same can be seen with Java: having all the shiny, fashionable features the tech geek blogs are abuzz with may be nice... but having old, boring, clunky, uncool software that your business depends on continue to work is far, far more valuable.
God, the memories. I remember booting up Windows 95 for the first time -- I was so stoked. Everything was so new and smooth and perfect. Plus -- and this is the important thing -- PPP worked much, much better than 3.1 + trumpet winsock. Some time around 98SE I was dual booting into BeOS, which was so damn fast it wasn't funny. But it wasn't to be. And I remember browbeating Red Hat 3 into connecting to the internet a…
I see what you did there.
This is a testament to how much trouble Microsoft goes through to maintain compatibility. I wonder whether malware from those early days would continue to run, or if newer versions of the OS would block it.
Much more than you would ever know.. The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated. In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating system allocate…
Impressive, but I have to wonder how many compromises had to be made, and advancements abandoned, to keep apps like Reversi and Dosshell all the way up through Win7...
I think it's one of those decisions where no matter what choice is made someone will complain about it.