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Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

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Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#301

Post by pseudosavant »

dotnet00 wrote: post #292
fnordpiglet wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is at that time updates for most shrink wrapped software were almost non existent and distribution even worse. Windows had an update facility and I bet you sim city for dos did not. So, either windows yielded and patched it’s behavior to run sim city or sim city users couldn’t run it under windows full stop until maxis distributed a new distribution on media. In todays world it looks like a ludicrous soluti…

And it's worth emphasizing that Microsoft was/is incentivized to do this because especially with popular software, such bugs have a chance of resulting in users blaming Windows even if in reality it's the gamedev's fault. Similarly to how GPU vendors are incentivized to patch their drivers to fix bugs in a popular game release because the bugs might be blamed on the vendor instead of the dev.

I don't have the reference for it here, but in the first year Windows Vista was out >50% of crashes were due to buggy nVidia drivers. Microsoft assumed (incorrectly) that their ecosystem would get their shit together automatically. That nVidia would make solid drivers for the new Windows WDDM driver model.

The year before Windows 7 came out I was working at a company (DivX ;-) making Windows software. We were getting contacted by different testing groups at Microsoft constantly. Some weeks three different people might contact me. Somehow they found my phone number? It didn't seem very efficient, but it was clear that they were allocating huge resources to this.

They found unbelievably nuanced bugs (their QA was better than ours...). They wanted to know when we were going to have a fix by. They wanted to make sure they didn't have a Vista repeat. Vista SP1 was actually quite stable, but it was too late for the Vista brand already.

With Windows 7 it seemed clear that the thing they cared about was: the software their users actually use still works after the update. Right or wrong, it was very user centric, because what user likes for their software to break? Nobody cares why.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#302

Post by michaelmrose »

amno wrote: post #291
PaulHoule wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about Microsoft is that they developed a framework for doing that kind of thing in a systematic way so it is not so hackish as it sounds. That's an innocent example but do recall that circa 1995-2005 or so, Microsoft looked like a dangerous monopolist and could have been in legal jeopardy if a product that competes with office (say WordPerfect) quit working when they went from Win 95 to Win 98 or Win 2k to…

Yes, people used undocumented functions, which were left undocumented as they were a subject to change, and accused Microsoft of not understanding software development or thought that those undocumented APIs were somehow better than the recommended documented ones. When stuff crushed after Microsoft changed an API people would be accusing them for deliberately breaking their applications and what not. I remember the…

Perhaps the negativity stems from the all the illegal, immoral, and damaging acts in this era.

Not least of which is pouring millions into a baseless pump and dump scheme laying hallucinated charges of infringement against the entire Linux ecosystem but there are plenty of other issues.

In short people hated them for being shitty people who do shitty things and present leadership were important folks when these shitty things were done everyone just moved up a few rings.

They aren't better people they just have better aligned incentives where illegality and immorality aren't profitable.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#303

Post by hoten »

Racing0461 wrote: post #273
knallfrosch wrote: post #20

See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…

This is actually what most gpu driver updates are. Instead of devs fixing their games, nvidia calcilated its in their best interest to just fix the game bugs at the gpu driver level and push updates.

Is this done by intercepting the API calls made to the GPU, or by directly modifying the game binary instructions?

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#304

Post by eternityforest »

worewood wrote: post #298
memefrog wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run binaries from decades ago on Linux too. This is about a DOS binary. Well, a command line program that just uses system calls is fine too.

Only if it is statically linked with everything it needs. Otherwise good luck resolving dependencies.

Even then it might not work because it could rely on a DBus daemon being there. Even a brand new binary might fail because it needs some external program they forgot to add to the dependencies list in the package, so you have to sift through to find the not at all obvious package that provides it.

Or something was compiled without some option for unknown reasons so you're just SOL unless you want to compile stuff yourself.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#305

Post by dboreham »

sillywalk wrote: post #296
pjmlp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Windows NT never forked anything. Windows 3.1 introduced Win16 protected mode with segmented memory. Win32s was a backport from a Win32 subset from Windows NT 4.0. Windows NT linage exists since 1993.

I remember Win32s, I think Netscape Navigator needed it. I was thinking Lode Runner, but that was WinG . I always thought it was backported from Windows 95, thanks for the info.

Iirc Win32s existed before Win95.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#307

Post by sowbug »

cratermoon wrote: post #297
jdjehxhdb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s why you stand where you are and Microsoft stand where it does. You’re thinking like an engineer. Microsoft is a business. Backwards compatible is its major core competency.

And yet Apple has famously broken compatibility on a regular basis. Remember when Apple went from Motorola 68000 to Intel x86? They did it by providing direct support to key companies to port their software, and providing Rosetta for applications that could take the performance hit.

Either extreme works. There's a sour spot (opposite of sweet spot?) in between, where the platform breaks compatibility, but not so predictably that customers remember how to reach their suppliers, and suppliers remember how to update their products.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#309

Post by runjake »

cratermoon wrote: post #297
jdjehxhdb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s why you stand where you are and Microsoft stand where it does. You’re thinking like an engineer. Microsoft is a business. Backwards compatible is its major core competency.

And yet Apple has famously broken compatibility on a regular basis. Remember when Apple went from Motorola 68000 to Intel x86? They did it by providing direct support to key companies to port their software, and providing Rosetta for applications that could take the performance hit.

I think you mean “PowerPC to Intel”. 68K was before PPC.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#310

Post by lamontcg »

pseudosavant wrote: post #301
dotnet00 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's worth emphasizing that Microsoft was/is incentivized to do this because especially with popular software, such bugs have a chance of resulting in users blaming Windows even if in reality it's the gamedev's fault. Similarly to how GPU vendors are incentivized to patch their drivers to fix bugs in a popular game release because the bugs might be blamed on the vendor instead of the dev.

I don't have the reference for it here, but in the first year Windows Vista was out >50% of crashes were due to buggy nVidia drivers. Microsoft assumed (incorrectly) that their ecosystem would get their shit together automatically. That nVidia would make solid drivers for the new Windows WDDM driver model. The year before Windows 7 came out I was working at a company (DivX ;-) making Windows software. We were getting…

Microsoft got to burn those kinds of resources on the compatibility problem due to having had a near-monopoly on the desktop back in those days.

That isn't going to be repeatable for pretty much any other software company other than a FAANG, and certainly not of open source projects, not even Linux. People don't pay enough to open source for that kind of support.

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