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by wisnoskij 1327 days ago
I think this is probably exaggerated. IN windows basically all old softwware works with very little fiddling. Maybe downloading a dll it literally just tells you it needs, maybe trying a few different compatibility modes. It is normally a <5 minute affair.

I am glad that MS goes ahead and fixed some of the most popular software, but even the ones they clearly did not do this for, work almost as seamlessly.
1 comments
AnIdiotOnTheNet 1327 days ago
There have been some notable application-specific hacks applied, at least in previous generations of Windows. SimCity comes to mind: it used memory after free and Windows... 95(?) broke it, so a hack was put in place to explicitly allow processes named simcity.exe to use memory after free. Or something like that.
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bombcar 1327 days ago
More details on that: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

What people miss from the story is why it was so important that Microsoft do that (and it's a similar reason to why Linus insists on never breaking userspace).

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