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  • Hacker News
  • This is a great example of how implementation becomes the specification.
    by manoDev
  • Wouldn't be surprised if this sort of backwards compatibility is an absolute goldmine for AI assisted vulnerability searches. Would place bets on MS having to remove some significant fraction of all this in the coming years.
    by adwf
  • Someone was watching NT to Now on Youtube I see, and playing with the Application SHIM system. There are a lot of quirky things from NT still in Windows 11. I think that Clock.exe was finally removed a year or two ago from 1994.
    by hypercube33
  • This spirit is clearly a part of MS's corporate DNA and honestly I think the world is far better off for it. No other platform owner would do this, not today at least. The most you could expect from say, Apple or Google, is that they do ship the betas. If you go all summer without fixing "your" "bug" (note: it could be that the new OS is the code that introduced the bug) it'll just crash on OS launch day and the platform owner would make no attempt to even test it for you.

    Maybe there's a tiny exception with like, Apple for Adobe. They might place a phone call between executives to warn them to avoid angering the "pros" who use those apps, but I think it's more because their users internally who also use Adobe apps would notice in the course of testing the betas, than a practice of testing many apps with the intent to ensure they work correctly.

    To me what this feels like is that Microsoft's culture to this day considers it would be a breach of trust to ship an OS update that, from your perspective breaks your programs that used to work fine. Compared to the approach everywhere else today that the platform owner simply dictates How Things Will Be Now.

    by xp84
  • Why show a screenshot of a different game (SimCity 2000) when discussing SimCity?
    by Dwedit
  • By the way, the compatibility posture is now theoretical. I recently pointed out that Black and White was on archive.org to a friend. It didn't work on their Windows 11.

    (It did work under Wine with a few small tweaks that I can't remember)

    by zamalek
  • Whatever one might think of Windows and Microsoft, the idea that you can still run apps that are 30+ years old is incredible.
    by LASR
  • > The tradition goes back to SimCity, which only ran on Windows 95 because Microsoft wrote special code for it... Yes, Microsoft modified its OS just to cover up one game’s bug... The SimCity hack was a one-off

    The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".

    The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".

    by abanana

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