On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:22:34 +0000 Alexander Lamaison <awl03@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:
This is simply not going to happen. How could MS even go about doing this in Windows? It would make very single piece of Windows software incompatible with the next version!
That has never stopped them before -- see Windows 2.0 -> 3.0, Windows 3.x -> Windows 95 (only partial compatibility), various versions of WinCE/Windows Mobile/whatever-marketingspeak-name-they're-using-this-year... ;-)
I'm not convinced you're right about this. You only have to read The Old New Thing to see some of the remarkable (insane?) things MS do to retain backwards compatabiliy. I believe only the 64-bit versions of Windows Vista/7 ditch 16-bit program compatibilty - so you should be able to crack out those windows 3 programs on Windows 7 x86 and watch then run! :D
Yes, that answer was meant tongue-in-cheek. Microsoft got the backward-compatibility religion (for the desktop, at least) around the time they introduced Windows 95, because the only way to convince people to buy it was to show them that their old programs would continue to run. A few years ago they seemed to start drifting away from that again, but they seem to have rediscovered the need for it. -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * *