On 12 Jul 2002, at 17:36, Peter Castine wrote: > Apple's track record on backwards compatibility is actually, IMHO, pretty > good. I've still got a couple of dozen little apps that are more than 10 > years old and run on my current set up. Even OS X, the biggest OS change > in the last 18 years, still lets a number of non-updated apps run. Shame > about the audio & MIDI, though.
Microsoft is unequalled in maintaining backward compatibility. I have a client with Win2K who is running an ancient dBase II application from sometime in the mid- or early 80s. That was before DOS 3, before Windows was even in a gleam in Bill Gates's eye, long before protected mode OS's, hell, before protected mode even existed! Yet, it still works. I have seen no 16-bit Windows programs that fail entirely, though lots of odd little things can happen, usually, as you say with Mac programs that fail in later versions, because the programmers used some kind of unsupported hack (WordPerfect 6.1 was an example -- the minimize/maximize buttons for child windows in the MDI interface simply didn't work properly in Win95; had they been implemented using standard Win16 APIs, they would have worked flawlessly in Win95). MS no longer promises compatibility with older programs, but so far, I have no reports of problems from any of my clients who have a need to run the older programs. Microsoft doesn't get the credit they deserve for this. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
