This is awesome and most likely a part of their mission to make knowledge as accessible as possible. I have seen old, low-end donated PCs that are rife in elementary education in rural India and I'm sure in other developing countries as well. I am sure that these machines will be able to render wikipedia just fine!

Backwards compatibility is not the same as forwards compatibility, you seem to be confusing them.

You expect an application like Excel to open something made before by an earlier version. MS knows how to handle that format. However, you do not expect Excel 95 to open a xlsx file, it was a format that did not exist when Excel 95 was created.

You need something like FreeDOS or DOSbox to run the old DOS programs these days.

MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line terminal; not enough, but a lot.

So no, "command prompt" has nothing to do with DOS. You can run DOS programs from the GUI as well.

The first computers dealt with input via switches and levers. I don't think anyone would call the Colossus[0] a toy, and it had nothing resembling the command prompt that we know today.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

To run custom programs on it, you'll need to add a terminal to it or succumb to the sin of batch processing.

Colossus wasn't actually turing complete. It wasn't a computer except in historic sense.

(You could get command shells for the ST, because it was a programmable computer, so of course you could make it do pretty much whatever you wanted if you were willing to put the effort in. But the system didn't ship with a command line interface and (as I recall...) most of the programming environments - at least the ones popular in Europe - didn't include one either.)

"Immediate mode" counts.

Is an iOS device not a computer because it doesn't have a CLI?

What about a hypothetical computer that uses your brain as input - would that have a CLI? CLI/GUI/etc is irrelevant to the definition of computer.

Unless you're just being a pedantic troll, in which case kudos :)

"Is an iOS device not a computer because it doesn't have a CLI?" Not after you buy it, you have to turn it into a computer.

"What about a hypothetical computer that uses your brain as input - would that have a CLI?" It sure will, how else will you use it?

It's not pedantism. Pedantism is about meaning of words. My rant is about meaning of concepts. If you hit nails with your microscope, it's not a microscope for you but rather a lame hammer.

Then they made PowerShell, which removes any complaints one might have!

ps | where { $_.name -like "*host" } | foreach { $_.id | out-host }

Of course I'm talking ecosystem here.

IE5 was certainly rather painful to use. Google did not work correctly under it. Microsoft's sites were just about the most painful to browse.

Owing to some malware on the system hijacking some DNS things and some further DNS misconfiguration I couldn't even get Firefox for a while... but I did eventually restore order to the machine and get Firefox 10 ESR installed on it. (The latest supported version to work on Windows 2000.)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=1

Of course do be warned that you are using unsupported software that had not received security updates since July 2010.

http://i.imgur.com/XulRdv4.png

I would love to see more websites offering a no-frills version for older browsers, mobile browsers, smaller screens, etc.

Once I know that a site provides a specific value to me I really don't care about design and usability anymore.

[0]- https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/

Even in China, they say, a significant percentage of population lives happily with IE6 or below. Don't know the latest stats, but I am sure not much has changed there for good. If captain Jack Sparrow needs a broken compass for navigation, then broken compass is exactly what he'd use for navigation. What can anyone do about it?

[Edits: Jack Sparrow]

For what I can test http://www.alibaba.com/ looks decent in IE6.

One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

(can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in IE5?)

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203...

Also noticed the irony of microsoft.com being the worst, maybe it shows that the company wants to move forward, maybe it's just lazyness/rationalisation.

Also it's kind of abvious that amazon works well, they don't want to lose potentials customers (maybe same for google)

It's also probably near impossible to get their current site working on IE5, and to make a completely separate site just for them (and it's a really really small percentage of worldwide users) would be highly cost prohibitive.

Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

Can you tell me more about these sacrifices that would have to be made? I'm genuinely interested.

Then on the fly convert 320x200x256 colors to monochrome - I mean it was very silly - just pick one of the bits - and with some experiments it worked (no, it's not the way to go in general - but I was able to play).

That was dog slow, but it felt like smoking something, getting high - it didn't matter that the game was unplayable (10fps or less) - it was the fact that it worked!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

Doom 3 on a VooDoo 2 SLI setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY

Have a look what the Far Cry 3 people have created with Blood Dragon. Dont have to buy it, just have a look on youtube.

For example, even Amazon sites on Firefox 3.6.* browsers in the last couple of months show extremely inconsistent behaviour, e.g. inability to submit new searches after an existing search.

I suspect the only sites that actually work on that list without significant issues are Google and Wikipedia, both optimized to be highly compatible.

But this is only visual aspect, which I believe, is the only part that's easy to measure. It would be interesting to think on how to make it 'easy' to add other dimensions like Functionality, SEO, Accessibility etc. to the list.

In Firefox 20.0.1, with Javascript disabled, after the login the home listing has a "The Dropbox website require JavaScript" text.

[EDIT: Clickable, more info]

The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...

[1]: http://links.twibright.com/

[2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971....

It had its own set of insane quirks, even worse than Windows IE5. It was the default browser on Mac OS for a long time, until Safari I think.

its

I wager no one uses JSON shims anymore. I don't really know what would happen when you try to use JSON in ECMA 1 or 2.

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/1.9-stable/src/core.js...

Wikipedia still looks good because it uses tables for layout. It's worthy of IE 5.5's good graces at that point.