alt Hacker NewsI like that we are amazed by this. And yet all of my books from 34 years ago open up just fine (without cheating, no book opening emulator required!). I can even open a book on my shelf from 1896 without emulation. Not trying to troll too hard but I do think it is shocking how accustomed we've gotten to zero backwards compatibility in the world of software.
Replies
I think the point made here is that the application runs as if it were a modern application, even though the OS is completely unrecognizable when compared to the OS it was written for. There are other ways to run old applications on modern hardware with modern OSs, which the author would consider cheating for the purpose of TFA. Heck, I can run ancient DOS and gaming console applications on my phone if I wanted to.
I guess this is one of those proverbial “I had to create an account to comment” messages:
Give it a few centuries of evolution and maybe we'll get there
It is amazing, though. Wintel is basically a Matryoshka doll (Russian nesting dolls), where each version contains all the previous versions. (Just look at how a PC boots up!)
The dedication to compatibility is commendable, and you don't really see it on the other OS's. On that note, this is one of my favorite articles:
Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
I think that's very funny. Speaking of which, EasyToon also runs in WINE, of course :)
a better example would be whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track, or fire a musketball from an M16