I think our basic disagreement is over how long MS will continue to provide backward compatibility. "Backward compatibility" is a weasel concept anyway. Binary executables have a life-span like everything else in this world. Some work longer than others. For any given OS, each new OS version causes some old programs to quit working until gradually there is near-complete turnover. It is undeniable that in general the lifespan for Windows programs has been longer than Mac OS. (The whole tenor of this conversation seems to be a Mac-bashing one--a topic that utterly bores me.) But you yourself admitted that some Windows programs (e.g., WordPerfect) have fallen by the wayside. By contrast, I still have a few MacOS binaries I purchased in the 1980s that still work just fine in Panther OSX. In particular MS Word 5.1 and MS Works 3.
Personally, I believe that there will be a change in the Windows environment over the next 5 years that will rival the magnitude of the transition from DOS. I think a large number of older programs could be killed by it. Microsoft has a great deal of selfish incentive to kill off their pre-authenticated versions of Office, and if they do it, they will take a lot of other programs with them. But only time will tell.
I will say that, except for games, which probably have the shortest lifespan of any program, the older 1980s versions seem to have the longest lifespans on either platform. They had simple installation procedures, did not generally depend on complex middleware libraries, and used vanilla OS-level API calls. A great example is MS Works for MacOS. Works 3 still works on Panther, but Works 4 (a later version) died years ago. This is because Works 4 depended on a discontinued OLE library for MacOS that quit working (I believe) in OS9.
So, I think my little DOS utility collection, written in the 1980s, will probably continue to work long after the stuff I'm writing this year has ceased to function. (The stuff I'm writing this year depends on the .NET framework and the vagaries of ASP.NET and IE 6, and it could plausibly die with Longhorn.)
I think we agree on one thing, and that is that copy protection is abusive. One of the reasons that it is abusive is that it shortens the lifespan of binaries. I doubt very many if any copy-protected binaries from the 1980s still work, on either platform. In many such cases, the sole reason they don't work is that the copy-protection scheme no longer works. My personal attitude, though, is that I have acquiesced to it as a battle not worth fighting, since even non copy-protected versions eventually die.
David W. Fenton wrote:
This is twice now that you've attempted to completely change the terms of discussion. I expect more honest debate from someone like you, Robert.
-- Robert Patterson
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