[yuhong]

I think even MS is better than this at supporting old Office binary formats. Only PowerPoint has completely removed the support for pre-97 formats. With Word/Excel you can generally unblock support for older formats even if by default they will not open.

[sz4kerto]

'even MS'

MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs out there where you can start a 20 year old software and it runs almost always perfectly. (Try that on Linux or OSX.)

[npsimons]

How about 22 years? Specifically, see Alan Cox's comment about running a version of rogue compiled in 1992:

https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L...

As for MS, my experience has been different. All too often, when trying to pull up old (mid-90's) Word documents, MS Office chokes, where Libre/OpenOffice chugs along just fine.

[danielweber]

At Microsoft, if there is a design choice between "abandon the old user" or "let's forget them to make the current product better," they nearly always choose #1. Apple nearly always chooses #2. (I still remember DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.)

[laurent123456]

You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are pretty much the same :)

[danielweber]

Sheesh, it made sense 5 hours ago!

[NegativeK]

I spin up xspringies[1] every once in a while to waste some time. It's well over 20 years old and runs like a charm.

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html

[chimeracoder]

> Try that on Linux or OSX.

On OS X that would certainly fail (even much software that's between 5-10 years old would fail) this test.

But Linux provides a very stable ABI.

20-year backwards compatibility might be stretching it for Linux, since it's only around 20 years old to begin with. But if you have (e.g.) a statically linked Debian binary from the late 1990s, I'd bet almost anything it would still work on your desktop today.

[dman]

In my mind that honor belongs to Sun with Solaris.

[kalleboo]

Apple is also better at supporting old MS formats. I found some old recipes I wrote in Word 6.0.1 in 1998, which opened fine in OS X Mavericks's TextEdit.