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Nice. OpenBSD does something similar, with the difference being that there are no exemptions for specific software—they expect developers to fix their broken programs.
That's not similar at all! Windows takes the "Linux way" of "not breaking userspace" seriously. OpenBSD has other goals - some sense of minimality and clarity, but this is not one.
That was the joke, friend.
Non crap link http://farside.link/twitter.com/mikko/status/169250324959558...
Nitter hasn't been working for me since a few days ago. Is it just me or did X break it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see that makes sense. I feel it's also a little misleading from the original post. An exceptionally specific binary from 1993 works but the implication here is that the compatibility is more than this.
Author here. I've been running Windows since 3.0 and I copy my old tool folders with me whenever I change machines or upgrade the OS. This GZIP.EXE is the oldest EXE I have in my \ntbin tool folder that still works. The folder has 579 EXE files.
I think that is the point being made. This exe is cherry picked as the oldest working exe, it isn't like every 30 year old exe in that folder still works.
I don't often sing Microsoft's praises but backwards compatibility is something they get absolutely right: something they've always got right. Everything doesn't have to be changing and breaking all the time and, to me, it's a mark of maturity when an organisation can maintain compatibility so as not to inconvenience - and introduce unbudgeted (and sometimes very high) costs to - users, integrators, and consumers. Top marks, Microsoft.
Apple has never had a problem throwing away their customers’ investment in their ecosystem. I was at a company with several hundred Macs when the transition away from PowerPC happened. It was just brutal. And costly. Not just hardware, software too.
And, what for? From a business perspective, you can do the same fundamental work woth both systems. The difference are: My investment is protected in one case and not the other. We have a bunch of Macs here. Only where absolutely necessary and for multi-platform testing.
As much as MS is maligned by purists, the truth of the matter is they have always protected their customers by having a remarkable degree if backwards compatibility, which isn’t easy to achieve and maintain.
What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
So much so that even only linux, the most stable API arguably is win32 through wine. Atleast for desktop related tasks.
I'm going to go ahead and say operating systems that don't work this way are the exception. Running a 30 year old binary isn't all that big a deal. Pretty much every mainstream system does so every day in its day to day operation.
What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.
Really? Filesystem performance on Windows is absolutely horrible compared to Linux. It blows me away how, even using SSDs, the performance of git over large repos is at least 10x slower than a Linux box with the same CPU. It is the bane of my existence. It's not just git. rsync of a large directory takes >10x as long. This is with Server 2016 (and 2012 r2). My 2012 r2 machine had spinning disks and when I tested on 2…
And that's why Microsoft will dominate corporate PC market for the foreseeable future.
Shit, at my current job, we're developing software that runs solely on x86-64 Linux (And our output is an entire VM image, not just an executable), yet we're running on M1 Macs. TBH, it's quite painful and I wish I understood what the hell the engineering department is thinking, since you can't run x86-64 VMs on M1 hardware.
But for gamers, Windows's backwards compatibility makes it king. I can usually easily run 15+ year old games without a hitch.