In general, David is right that the MS operating systems have been
remarkably backward compatible and this has been a real positive quality
with Finale files. However, a year or two ago, I had a font problem and
tried to install to install my old copy of Fontographer — in its day
(frozen in 1998), the standard font design program — only to discover that
it couldn't handle the amount of RAM on my XP machine. It's a well-known
problem but I didn't have the patience to try the kludges suggested in
online fora, so I switched to FontForge, an open source program that's
just fine. This was more of a Fontographer problem than a Windows problem
and Font Lab, who now owns Fontographer, has promised a fix, but it is
still a good illustration of how tricky backwards compatibility can be.
Daniel Wolf
David Fenton wrote:
And computer music
files made 15 years ago can no longer be accessed
and used by any modern computers as OSs evolve.
Is this really true on Windows?
I am surprised at the way Apple has handled OS X versioning. So far
as I can tell, if you break software between versions, it's not the
same OS version, but Apple still keeps incrementing the decimal
points and saying it's still OS X.
The other surprising thing to me is that there isn't any emulation
software for OS X so you could run a VM and run your older version of
OS X in order to run the old software.
I don't mean this as Apple bashing at all. It's more just an
observation of how things are, and that I'm surprised it works that
way.
I'm also stunned every time I find out how backwardly compatible
Windows is, even with old, nonstandard software. I hesitate to cast
MS in the role of "good guy" here, but I don't know of any software
for DOS/Windows that postdates the introduction of the IBM PC that
cannot be run on current versions of Windows (Win7, for instance),
whether directly or in a VM.
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