Re:Torvalds: Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my but...
by flomo on Sunday March 27, 2011 @12:33AM
(#2374179)
Oddly enough, MacOS had better back-compatibility with the old applications than the newer ones. It seemed like pretty much every app broke at least once between Systems 7 and 9, even while the 1985 apps ran fine. (Perhaps the developers were being trickier in how they abused the OS.)
Incidentally, I think this figured into Apple's thinking regarding limited back-compat. They had already unintentionally forced a number of application upgrades, why not do something positive like move everyone to a new OS/CPU/API in the process?
Re:Torvalds: Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my but...
by yuhong on Saturday March 26, 2011 @03:30PM
(#2372946)
>System 7 had special code in the memory manager for Microsoft applications to make them work with the 32-bit memory manager and virtual memory.
Yea, MultiFinder had special code to load old MS applications like Excel 1.5 below the 1MB line because they were only 20-bit clean.
Apple did in fact do a lot of bending over backwards for compatibility, at least when it was a major developer breaking the rules. System 7 had special code in the memory manager for Microsoft applications to make them work with the 32-bit memory manager and virtual memory.
That said, Microsoft does do an outstanding job in this area. I remember when Win98 was coming out, we were not in the beta program at work. We got a call from Microsoft telling us that a VxD of ours was not working on Win98, telling us what assumption it was making that was no longer valid, and inviting us into the beta program. We were not a large, well-known company. That was pretty cool.