Whenever I write about old software, it still strikes me how absurd it is that it’s easier to run software from the 90s and 2000s on a modern computer than it is to run an iOS app from 15 years ago.
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@misty Unless it is some web based app obviously…
@misty Is it because there are no iOS emulators out there? Anything else can be run on emulation software. But that's not what you mean, right?
@misty This is how all 21st century tech works. Or doesn't work.
@misty People used to complain about Lotus. Lotus was a streamlined miracle compared to modern work.
@misty Yes. Or even Windows 95-XP apps. I run Apple II, C64, Amiga, DOS, classic Mac, etc. apps without any problem at all but Windows from ten years ago? Such a pain. And as you say, old iOS or Android apps are a nightmare.
@PastaThief That’s because you’re using emulators, I guess! Whereas 32-bit Windows executables from arbitrary time periods tend to work fine for me on modern Windows.
@misty reminded me of this post from a few days ago! And I jokingly wanted to suggest to some of my co-workers the idea to port our archival description software to a GBA/NDS… like LSDJ exists, it should be technically possible to do archival description work on a gameboy 😆
@misty
Proprietary systems age really poorly.
And ones from today will be totally borked in 8-15 years from now, cause it's all relying on cloud services now
Proprietary systems age really poorly.
And ones from today will be totally borked in 8-15 years from now, cause it's all relying on cloud services now
@mansalia You say that, but the software from 15 years ago that still works fine today is all for Windows. It’s less proprietary vs not than it is about the incentives to keep backwards compatibility. And MS is locked into eternal backwards compatibility whether they like it or not.
@sashin @mansalia That’s right. Microsoft’s main competitive advantage is that there’s 40 years of software written for Windows, and many businesses depend on a lot of it. They’ve only intentionally broken binary compatibility twice in Windows history (once when they cut off pre-Windows 3.0 executables, and a second time when they cut off 16-bit software).
@misty "The following are observations and notes from running named 4.8.3 (1990) from 4.3BSD-Reno ported to 386BSD running on NetBSD as a caching resolver and an authoritative server."
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[:] https://dnsinstitute.com/research/2021/ancient-1990-bind-4.8.3.html