On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:20:40PM -0500, Michael Wojcik wrote: > This has gone on far too long, and I'm not really interested in > arguing the point.
When I am not really interested in arguing a point anymore, I just stop doing it. I don't consider that a bad habit. > [...] > So, for the record: > 16-bit Windows applications continued to run unchanged under Windows 3.0. Except for the ones that did not get enough main memory anymore thanks to the fatter system. Those simply would refuse to work... > [Win 1.0 - 3.0] > > So, at best, that's a > > period of 4.5 years of "API stability". That's close to a joke, > > especially when taking into account that < 3.11 was not usable for any > > reasonable practical purpose... > > Tell that to the hundreds of customers we sold development tools for > Windows 2.0. First, this leaves a few more developers whom you did _not_ sell your development tools. Second, selling someone a brush and a few buckets of paint does not necessarily mean that the house he's living in is in good shape. Etc. Anyway. That's subjective. > > [...] X11R3: End of 88, X11R4: End of 89. > > And clients continued to work. And they still work, under X11R5. New > releases came out and API compatibility was maintained. And still a lot of user code broke. Wasn't it even Motif++ that barely survived the jump from R3 to R4? [And where is it nowadays?] > Which was my point. And my point was that maintaining compatibility is possible, if the feature set is pretty much frozen and all new development is done in some kind of add-on. And even then it's not _easily_ possible. Remember the time when suddenly no Turbo Pascal program could start on new machines because the time calibration loop was executed too quickly causing a division by zero? Luckily people could use hex editors back then ;-} > > Pretty much around 1990 supposedly the last person died that used plain X. > > What's "plain X"? Everyone always ran windows managers on top of X11. > That's part of the architecture. "Plain X" as in "Xlib", possibly with Xt. In contrast to, say, Athena, Motif, Gtk or whatever toolkit of the day - with way shorter life cycles than the "basic library". > > [...] > > Spring (?) 2001 - January 2002. > > I don't know what those dates are supposed to refer to. BSD 4.3 was > released in 1986. BSD 4.4 in 1994. I already admitted that I indeed mixed up the BSD factions here. So you are right. _Something_ was factual incorrect. Andre'
