[pyre]

> stuff I wrote for NT4 in 1996 works today absolutely fine and I reckon it will in another 20 years

What about:

- Plays For Sure?

- Silverlight?

- ActiveX?

- 16-bit apps?

- DOS apps?

- etc...

I'm sure any of the stuff that you wrote for Windows For Workgroups doesn't still work. I think that your 20 years prediction is entirely too optimistic.

[monstermonster]

Plays for sure was no different to iTunes DRM and m4p files. It died because no one wanted it.

Silverlight was a dead end I agree but it is still officially supported.

ActiveX is still supported. It's just COM.

16-bit apps and DOS apps worked until everything went 64-bit. Win7 32-bit could run DOS apps. This is a processor limitation. NT had a VDM subsystem for this.

Win32 abstracts away WFWG stuff so I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm writing this on a windows NT machine with 512Mb of RAM running win32 and WPF for ref (win phone).

[pyre]

> Silverlight was a dead end I agree but it is still officially supported.

For how long though? The parent post was talking about everything working 20 years into the future.

> ActiveX is still supported. It's just COM.

Are you disputing that there are companies still out there that have internal apps reliant on IE6? I'm not saying it's smart, but at this point keeping IE6 going has to be work. If they could upgrade, why wouldn't they?

> This is a processor limitation.

When you are predicting that your 18 year old app will continue to function out-of-the-box for another 20 years, how is hardware not a factor?

[monstermonster]

Yes 20 years no problems for windows API. Look how old the Unix API is. Not Silverlight although most of that is portable straight to c#+WPF deployed via ClickOnce with a few hours' work.

We have a company that has IE6 and XP deployed to over 1000 workstations. IE11 does ActiveX still. We use it via WebTwain to scan documents from a web app via a drum scanner. It works very well.

Hardware is not a factor. Don't forget that x86 is well over 30 years old already, isn't even CISC under ISA any more and there is virtualization and emulation as well. I saw windows 95 booting on a wrist watch in the tech press the other day.

[pyre]

> Don't forget that x86 is well over 30 years old already

Don't say that too loudly. I've seen some 'passionate' Internet argument over how all of the terms AMD64, x86-64 and x86_64 are all wrong because it's really the x64 arch that we're all running on now. :P

[monstermonster]

I've heard that one too. Lets hope it doesn't devolve into that :)