[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.

[scarface74]

You call the Carbon API that existed from 2001-2018 “short lived”? The entire Carbon API was used to port software like PhotoShop and Office.

Carbon was a port of enough of the Classic API to port major important programs.

AppleScript is still built into the current version of OS X. It was introduced in 1993-94

And seeing that 10.1 was PPC only, do you expect them to keep a PPC emulator around?

Can you run PPC based Windows NT software today on an x86 PC?

[dahauns]

Sounds to me more like the ported programs were short lived - and IMO, in that they are not entirely wrong.

Sure, Carbon and Rosetta certainly were no mean feat, and the drastic PPC/x86 break is something Microsoft never really had to deal with (heh, the biggest problem trying to run a PPC/MIPS/Alpha based NT application today is actually finding one :) ).

But Apple never went to the same lengths as Microsoft regarding backwards compatibility, and while Carbon and Rosetta immensely eased the transition, the continuity definitely wasn't comparable and it was never transparent to the developers (and in Apple's defense, this was never their intention and they always were quite open about it.)

For one, Rosetta (and thus PPC compatibility) was dropped with Lion in 2011, so no amount of Carbon would help 10.1 applications after that.

And even with Rosetta, each release, especially after Tiger, came with quite a list of API changes and deprecations (with the whole of Carbon declared obsolete in 2012) - and and increasingly longer list of high-profile software that would not run anymore and require an update or upgrade. And while Microsoft did a lot even to prevent and/or work around issues with notorious software (hello Adobe! :) ), Apple was far less willing to do so.

I mean, just as an example - I can run Photoshop 6.0 (from 2000) on Windows 10 (certainly no thanks to Adobe), but no chance for PS 7.0 even on Leopard...

[virtue3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

"Carbon was an important part of Apple's strategy for bringing Mac OS X to market, offering a path for quick porting of existing software applications, as well as a means of shipping applications that would run on either Mac OS X or the classic Mac OS. As the market has increasingly moved to the Cocoa-based frameworks, especially after the release of iOS, the need for a porting library was diluted. Apple did not create a 64-bit version of Carbon while updating their other frameworks in the 2007 time-frame, and eventually deprecated the entire API in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which was released on July 24, 2012. Carbon was officially discontinued and removed entirely with the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina."

I think you are confusing "supported" with EoL. Adobe was pissed because there was originally talk of doing a carbon64bit and they never supported it so they had to move their entire app over.

The main point is, that Windows would never stop that api from "existing" In some manner. Unlike Apple.

This is just a difference in how both companies view themselves. While Apple claims "it just works". That isn't quite true in some of the cases we have seen. Microsoft has actually done a far better job of this.

I know someone that worked on the visual studio team. They literally had 100-200 servers that would run overnight with each build guaranteeing that the software would install and run on every single permutation of windows on an array of hardware.