Endless backward compatibility is unrealistic and there is a point where
providing some aspect of it costs a company more than it's worth in user
retention. Should Microsoft or anyone else really have to deal with all
the heartache of enabling and supporting 16-bit software on a 64-bit OS
at this point in time, especially when there are solutions like
virtualisation and containers? Windows does a better job than almost
anything bar certain big-iron mainframe operating systems in this
respect.
It doesn't take any "extra" work at all to enable software that uses
a smaller memory schema to work on an OS that can use larger memory
schemas, as long as the OS is designed from the ground up not to
isolate those schemas into separate silos. It was predictable at the
time when Office 97 was released that eventually more addressable
memory would be needed, so it could have been planned for at that
time. In fact, OSes at that time could address locations on much
larger hard drives than were available for sale. I don't think it
magically takes fewer bits to record the location of something out
beyond 4 GB a hard drive than it takes to record the location of
something beyond 4 GB in memory. OSes are not designed that way as
deliberate planned obsolescence, so vendors can extract more money
from customers. There is no techical issue with this at all.
Using console vs graphical software is a more difficult problem, but
it's not the same as 16-bit vs 32-bit or 64-bit.
As I noted in my previous reply, running software that is not
"NT-aware" on later OSes does result in problems, many, but not all,
of which can be corrected with registry hacks.
64-bit is not necessary or helpful for most line-of-business
applications. Instead of trying to convince people to accept it as
the default, it should be treated as a specialty option for specific
uses, such as high-capacity servers.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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