Hacker News Reader

yes but you can take an app from the 80s and still run it on Windows 7 today

With DOS emulator. There is no problem to run DOS app from 80s on Linux/MacOS/whatever with dosbox. By the way, dosbox is far better for some apps than DOS emulator from Windows XP/Vista/7.

you are not understanding the issue here. we are talking about the windows API - they have supported every aspect of it in a backwards compatible way since its inception.

read the Raymond Chen blog about how they used SimCity as a benchmark to test if their backwards compat was working. Marc Andreessen is even on the record as being an admirer of the Windows backwards compat work. they put a lot of work into it and placed a high value on it because they did not want to break developer trust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com