[bjornjajajaja]

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems.

Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old.

A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same document with others.

It would be fun to use an older machine and see how productive you can be with the old software too !

[joking]

Been hit with that, I needed to run chromium v49 to be able to remote debug some TVs with old opera tv sdks, the version I had stoped working, and several versions that I tried crashed when using the chromium devtools. I ended having to use a windows virtual machine

[Moru]

I wish I could find the movie on youtube again, a demonstration of collaborative text editor from 1960-ish. Been looking for it a number of times just this year.

[tech-no-logical]

from the mother of all demos (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&feature=youtu.be...

I suppose you mean this video ?

[Fice]

A better link: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/ And also: https://archive.org/details/dougengelbartarchives?sort=title... because youtube videos are ephemeral.

[Moru]

Thankyou, that was nicely indexed even!

[danShumway]

Please post back if you find it, I'd be curious to see.

[Moru]

As posted by Fice above:

https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/

It's a very interesting show, how they solved the displays with commercial cameras filming the lcd displays in the lab and sending to the users screen. How the mouse worked, five button keyboard and so on.

[scarface74]

You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?

[ygjb]

Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox.

Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud services get to conventional computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A Deepness in the Sky...

[euler_angles]

When I worked for a NASA contractor doing sounding rocket telemetry, the main telemetry stack programming software was a Turbo C program from 1987-1990 (TDP502.exe on the odd chance that the maybe 50 other people on the planet who have ever used it sees this). Works just fine in DOSBox, at least to create files. Still needed an actual older PC with an ISA slot to handle the hardware that TDP knew how to control. But for configuration tasks, Windows + DOSBox + a USB 3.5" floppy drive = I could do things on an actual modern system.

So yeah, you're right, emulation saves the day in many cases. And I felt like a programmer-archaeologist using DOS to launch something into space in the 2010s...

[cptaj]

I cant upvote this enough. The Vernor really captured this. As a programmer you can clearly see this happening right now.

I shudder to think of the massive house of cards we will have in 50 years.

[breatheoften]

Can you imagine how massive the field of software archeology will actually need to be to capture an understanding of the human experience of software development in the “distant past”.

Take any given product or system. what percentage of the software involved in implementing the system was written x years in the past. What’s gonna happen to that distribution in 10 or 100 years?

I wonder how inevitable it is that this percentage of ancient software in virtually every system will just keep growing and growing over time — until the systems of the future are tiny layers built on top of 1000 year old, impenetrable old growth forests which as well have been written by aliens for their understandability ...

[scarface74]

So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?

[criley2]

Virtualizating Windows isn't very hard, even back to something like Windows 95.

On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in VMware.

This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc virtualization software, but if you need to run osx software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck.

You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.

[unqueued]

There seems to be a misconception that you can only run 10.5 and later in a VM, but you can actually run OSX 10.4 Tiger fairly easily. This is the non server version. [1]

I was able to import almost everything from my old PPC computers. It's not completely virtualized because is using Rosetta and can not use Classic OS apps. But it is still extremely useful, and way faster than my PPC computers ever were.

[1]: https://github.com/ranma42/TigerOnVBox

[MarioMan]

>OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.

If you aren't a stickler for Apple's terms of service (if you're doing this for business purposes, I suggest you should be), you can use a tool called macOS unlocker to patch VMWare Workstation to run macOS VMs. Runs great, though all VMWare products can only render display output for macOS in software mode.

[aasasd]

Run a shady binary that seems to not have a certain author/website, as administrator, so it modifies VMWare binaries? A rather... curious approach, but for some reason common in Windows among e.g. gamers.

I've ran MacOS in VirtualBox iirc, without shady patches―though it probably was in Linux.

[scarface74]

A quick Google search for running PPC Mac software under emulation.

https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#pow...

For the most part yes. If you want to run Mac software you need to own Mac.

As far as going back 30 years. Now you’re in the Classic Mac era. There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old.

If you want to go back 40 years. Apple // emulators are a dime a dozen.

[klodolph]

> There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old.

What, Basilisk II and Sheep Shaver? PCE and Mini vMac if you want a Mac Plus. For a large array of apps only one of these options will actually work.

[xattt]

Thanks for the flashback! I remember when PearPC was announced!

I’d been wanting a Mac for several years, but had little understanding of how it worked. PearPC let me try it out and a get a glimpse of Mac OS X.

[criley2]

That's fair, but this was about virtualization not emulation. Similar but different, but that's certainly a solution too.

[userbinator]

10.4 x86, the origins of Hackintosh, will be the first version that's actually practical to virtualise.

[tinus_hn]

Pearpc can run MacOS X 10.1.

[scarface74]

You act as if no x86 OS X software that was written before 10.7 will run on 10.7.

[cptskippy]

You're drawing an equivalence between 5 and 25 year old software?

Microsoft Windows 10 is able to run software that predates all of Apple's supported platforms.

[zamalek]

There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you could imagine.

[scarface74]

So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator?

Someone else was complaining that they didn’t keep FireWire. Should modern Macs come with ADB ports?

[Ahwleung]

Obviously not, but that doesn't prove that there isn't value to having backwards compatibility. Sometimes you just want something to run and not have to touch or change it for a long time.

A 20-year old machine that's critical to a factory can run off a serial cable plugged in to an expansion card running software written in the 90's that will still run on Windows 10. Nobody in their right mind would decide to write that same software on a Mac.

[scarface74]

Well, given where all of the PC manufacturers are that were around in 1990 compared to the revenue and profit of just the Mac division, it seems like Apple didn’t make a bad business decision not prioritizing backwards compatibility.

If you compare where Apple is and where Microsoft is also, it doesn’t seem like chasing enterprise PC sales was as good of a long term bet as going after the consumer market....

[catalogia]

> So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator?

I don't think it's unreasonable that Apple hasn't done so, but neither do I think doing so would be unreasonable. Archive.org can emulate Apple II's in your browser, I'm sure Apple could add an equivalent feature to MacOS if that were something they cared to do. They obviously don't, and that's their prerogative.

[cptskippy]

I have a Windows 10 PC with a PCI (not express) slot that I installed a Firewire card in last year to use 15 year old software still available from Sony's website to rip a stack of Digital8 home movies.

[scarface74]

And Apple has sold a Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter for years.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbo...

[bangboombang]

I tackled that project about two years ago. Asked around and a friend had an old laptop with FW port, so I installed Ubuntu on it and copied all my old Video8 and Digital8 Tapes.

[rootusrootus]

That is fair, though, because it is equally likely to find someone that will never give Apple credit for a single thing.

[zamalek]

In the face of what Apple does for privacy, comparatively, nobody else doing a damn thing. Privacy is by a very significant margin the most important metric.

[ajross]

True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3".

The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.

[scarface74]

Apple shipped the last 32 bit Mac in 2006 over 10 years before 32 bit software wasn’t supported. There were plenty of FireWire to Thunderbolt adapters.

No the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7. There were Carbon APIs until last year. A poster up thread said they could use an emulator. There are 68K Mac emulators available too.

AppleScript for instance is a System 7 technology - not a NextStep technology.

[cptskippy]

> the closest ancestor to MacOS X is System 7.

How do you figure?

System 7 was part of the Classic Mac OS line, the last of that line was System 9 (Mac OS 9). This was a proprietary kernel developed by Apple.

Mac OS X is a Unix based OS derived from technologies they acquired from NeXT.

To say MacOS X is an ancestor of System 7 seems completely nonsensical.

[scarface74]

No MacOS X when it was originally released had parts from NextStep and parts ported from Classic MacOS including QuickDraw, AppleScript, QuickTime, some audio frameworks etc.

The entire Carbon API was a port of classic MacOS APIs to make porting from classic MacOS to OS X easier.

MacOS X was a combination of both. That was the whole brouhaha of why Apple ported Carbon APIS to OS X because major developers like Adobe and Microsoft insisted on it.

That’s not to mention that the first 5 versions of MacOS had an entire OS 9 emulator built in.

To take the analogy to the extreme. MacOS had two parents - Classic MacOS and NextStep.

[cptskippy]

I would disagree, most of what was brought from Classic OS was ported, adapted, out of necessity and short lived. OSX was an entirely new operating system that ported some frameworks and software but wasn't backward compatible. Were it so, they wouldn't have provided an emulator.

I think you're just supporting the original assertion that Apple does not support things for very long. Does Software written for OS X v10.1 run on Catalina today without using 3rd party tools or emulators? Software written for Windows 95 still runs on Windows 10.

[usrusr]

And so the mystery of why a 32bit version of Windows 10 still exists is solved.

What's mildly annoying is that much of the early 32bit Windows software came packaged in 16 bit installers. Office 97 would be such a breeze on modern hardware.

[dmz73]

Office 97 can be installed on 64 bit windows 10 with original installer. I have done it just last month and it runs without any problems... and it is fast.

[tinus_hn]

There are special workarounds, many of the old installers run a small piece of 16 bit code which doesn’t work in 64 bit Windows but because it’s so common Windows just runs a replacement version.

[usrusr]

Failed the last time I tried, which must have been on 7. Will be a strong example for Microsoft dedicating resources to compatibility if they added it for 10 or with a patch update. (both their resources and the users', there's a crazy amount of checking for necessary compatibility hacks going on whenever an executable is started)

[kaetemi]

I had some selection rendering issues in Excel, and Word is reporting some kind of registry corruption on startup. Otherwise, works fine.

[quink]

> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/win32/winprog64/app...

[int_19h]

There are some third-party implementations of NTVDM that allow running 16-bit DOS and Win16 apps directly on Win64. Although DosBox is still the easiest route, and "good enough" in practice.