This has gone on far too long, and I'm not really interested in arguing the point. But some of your response is simply factually incorrect. So, for the record:
Andre Poenitz wrote: > On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 11:21:27AM -0500, Michael Wojcik wrote: >> Andre Poenitz wrote: >>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 03:42:52PM -0500, Michael Wojcik wrote: >>>> I've worked on many projects that maintained backward compatibility >>>> with new releases of the API, and seen a great many more. >>> Just for my curiosity: Which projects, which scope? >> - Early versions of Windows. The Windows 1.x to Windows 2.0 and >> Windows/286 transition maintained compatibility in the Windows API; >> Windows 1.x applications ran unchanged in the 2.0 family. > > Windows 2.0 was released pretty exactly two years after 1.0, Windows 3.0 > completely broke the API 2 1/2 years later. 16-bit Windows applications continued to run unchanged under Windows 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. >> - X11R3. The X11 API was layered correctly: as long as the server >> follows the protocol spec, it doesn't matter what it does under the >> covers. I added support for new hardware to the ddx layer; wrote new >> window managers with completely different look-and-feel from the >> standard ones; added extensions to X11 itself. None of that interfered >> with existing clients one bit. > > 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. Which was my point. > 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. >> - The 4.3 BSD kernel. Extended multihead support in the console driver >> and wrote some drivers for new hardware. Enhanced the shared memory >> kernel option. Nothing that didn't want to use the new features needed >> to be recompiled. > > 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. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
