10 years ago is giving Apple too much credit. They were using Intel processors then, ARM now. For now, you can still run Intel applications, but that won’t last much longer.

More importantly, a 10 year old application is likely to use Carbon instead of Cocoa. Unless it’s an extremely simple application (i.e. hello world), it is unlikely to run.

Then there’s the depreciation of resource forks, a new filesystem, tons and tons of extra security restrictions, etc.

god forbid you ever want to run any 32 bit programs. you can’t even play the orange box games anymore

More like:

Can you install this 25 year old program?

Mac OS: LOL! Buy a new laptop!

My company is currently working through this.

The entire dev team has Macs. Most have Intels. Many are on M1. Some are on M2.

Security/IT teams feel the pain, dealing with all sorts of weird things. And their solution lately is saying “fuck it” and giving the dev a M2. Which is a bandaid as what if M3 and onwards continues to break something?

Fortunately, my team builds software and runs everything through docker.

Mac: can you install this 10 year old program: no.

Or simply just: Too old version not supporting latest macos version.

THEY BREAK SHIT WHEN THEY RELEASE A NEW MACOS HOLY FUCK.

Me: can you run this cool game I found

Mac: no

Are they doing full blown ARM processor’s now? I thought they still had enough devices less than three years old that still used Intel because of the COVID manufacturing delays.

Pretty sure Windows has more legacy components than Linux just because no nerds are updating it in their free time

Always jarring when you open a folder dialog, and an unresizeable chunk of Windows 3.1 suddenly appears.

I know it’s still in the ODBC settings, probably other places too.

No, literally. 11 still has some pre-XP dialog boxes. The framework they were written in obviously too (+at least 11 more).

And there will be a riot if they try to change it

This bothers me a lot and also applies, to some extent, to MS office software. If you go deep enough you end up in the same old clunky UI that actually did the job.

weirdoldlib.so.13: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It’s just another rage comic character

Just because it installed, doesn’t mean it doesn’t run.

Or doesn’t come with 50x “are you sure” prompts

Plenty of old apps still run fine. I’ve got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I’m reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.

You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn’t have separate admin permissions) but often they work.

Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have the NTVDM component that’s required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It’s an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.

A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.

Drivers are definitely out. Some games are really iffy. Especially from the Win 9x era, where they’d do stupid things like look for a 9 in the version string of Windows, or get the amount of RAM as a 32 bit signed int, so refuses to install if you have 4GB RAM or more.

We had a lot of dodgy old DOS programs that were fine under Win98, but XP broke them.

I thought the joke was about old binaries.

… As long as you have this week’s release of 25 dev tools pulled in from some dank npm/composer repo and you’re okay with it.

Wow, have dev bros gotten bad.

Run in cOmPaTiBiLtY mOdE.

More like:

Windows Of Course! You can even save it in the new format because the one you were using is pretty dated and insecure.

What kind of documents?

Did that as a work project on Unix. My peer had a similar porting project.

I thought I was screwed: 20-year-old c-based backup tool. His was easy: this perl web app is installing on a new box because its old one is being lifecycled.

Actual: after 3 weeks of dependency hell he tossed it all and rewrote the thing in c from scratch overnight. My c project was make;make-install with no errors.

I think it’s been recompiled a few times since then, without any code changes.

Yes this makes sense. Linux running a 25yr old binary would throw errors for shared libraries, or kernel compatibility or just the fact it’s the wrong arch type.

In my experience, on Windows a lot of old stuff runs as long as you have whatever registry setting enabled that lets you run non 64 bit programs. This isn’t available on every windows pc but if you’re running it on your home pc, you can probably get it. A lot of old games don’t work but old things that don’t use graphics almost always run.

In wine, it’s basically the same story. A lot of old stuff runs especially non graphical old stuff. Some old windows games don’t work on wine but just because something old doesn’t work on Windows doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work on wine and vice versa.

I would rate wine as slightly more compatible with late 90s and early 2000s games than Windows is but ymmv. Graphics stuff tends to work a little more often on wine. Some mid 2000s games use obscure hacks that are impossible to ever get running on wine.

apt