Re:The shockingly obsolete code of bash
by UnoriginalGuy on Monday September 29, 2014 @10:48PM
(#8386541)
Agreed. Everyone likes to make a sport of bashing Microsoft (no pun intended), but that is simply WHY Microsoft is so darn successful: Backwards compatibility up the ying-yang.
You buy a piece of software from 1995, it would likely have continued to work on any 32 bit Windows including Windows 7 released in 2009. The only reason why a lot of really old software has broken recently is that 16 bit support simply no longer exists on x86-64 CPUs in 64 bit mode (which can be somewhat mitigated with XP mode or Client Hyper-V in Windows 7 and 8 respectively).
You buy a piece of software from 1995, it would likely have continued to work on any 32 bit Windows including Windows 7 released in 2009. The only reason why a lot of really old software has broken recently is that 16 bit support simply no longer exists on x86-64 CPUs in 64 bit mode (which can be somewhat mitigated with XP mode or Client Hyper-V in Windows 7 and 8 respectively).
Linus Torvalds gets this concept: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495