Comment on [deleted]

• m_f@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There’s at least one example you can look at, the Jenkins CI project had code like that (if (name.startsWith(“windows 9”)) {):

  issues.jenkins.io/secure/…/PlatformDetail

  Microsoft, for all their faults, do (or at least did) take backwards compatibility very seriously, and the option of “just make devs fix it” would never fly. Here’s a story about how they added special code to Windows 95 to make SimCity’s broken code work on it:

  Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

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  • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    video drivers do this nowadays.

    its part of the reason your nvidia driver is gigabytes in size (other than the bloat)

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    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      part of the reason why Nvidias drivers are larger is because theres a lot of functionality that nvidia throws onto as software rather than hardware. after kepler, nvidia moved the hardware scheduler off the gpu and into the driver. this resulted in lower power consumption, but higher cpu usage (reletive to amd). Its why AMD gpus fare better when paired with a aging cpu than Nvidia does.

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      • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        this is interesting as fuck.

        where can i read more about his architectural change?

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• gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s absolutely not a made-up reason.

  It was a way to get around the fact that Microsoft didn’t use proper version numbers for ages, and it became standard (enough) practice such that MS had to account for it if they didn’t want to break legacy support for a shitload of software that enterprises customers care about.

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• deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s not websites, it was about local apps.

  There are a bunch of 20 year old apps designed for Windows XP which would complain that Windows 9 is too old.

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• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Can you imagine? “Microsoft demands all websites update their code for new operating system.”

  The alternative being “Why websites think your new computer is old.”

  Microsoft dodged all of that by skipping a version number and the worst question they get asked is “Where did Windows 9 go?”

  They even had tshirts that said “Because 7 8 9”.

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• saigot@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Say should all you want, when the user has been using an app for 20 years and then an update breaks it they blame Microsoft not the app. Although I think a big part of it was also choosing 10 as a nice round number for their “”“final”“” os.

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  • splicerslicer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The “final” is thing was never true though. Wholey based on an off the cuff remark by one engineer.

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