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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Back in the days, Microsoft took backwards compatibility very seriously, maybe more than anyone else besides mainframes. Going as far as making special cases so that applications that relied on some bugs or undocumented features continued working.

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IIRC not for Word file formats. Usually only the previous version would definitely convert, any older and things started breaking. And it would always save in the newest version by default so everyone else has to update to edit your file (there were free readers, but they were separate programs and I don't know how popular they were).

Yup, exactly this. And there would usually be an official plugin you could optionally install to read files from ~2 versions ago, presumably because businesses demanded it, but still wouldn't go back farther.

I can't think of any other program that removed the ability to open older versions of its own files. Kinda crazy.

Aren't there only two word file formats, going back to the 1990s? I've never seen a conversion problem.

DOC and DOCX right? I feel like there might have been some DOC 97 and DOC 2003 etc stuff going on but my memory fails me

There are three .doc pre office 97, .doc after 97 and .docx.

There are two file extensions, but with every new word version there was new features, and thus new stuff that had to be represented in the saved file. If you only went forwards and didn't skip to many versions, and remembered to save the file again in the newer version you'd be fine. but as the mastodon thread says, anything from before a certain date won't open at all, and more complex documents from the 90s and early 00s might have surprising issues in modern word.

Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's clear that the internal representation had changed from an 8-bit encoding to UTF-16 but I learned to be careful to "save as Word 95" every time from then on.

That is forward compatibility and is much more difficult to maintain.

Somebody more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but iirc some of the earlier versions of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 were incompatible with the latest version of Windows at the time that was unreleased at the time of the game's launch (because RCT2 used a memory management bug? I don't remember) so the Windows team coded up a special exception for RCT2 because they knew that users would blame Windows rather than the RCT2 team if the game failed to launch). This patched version of Windows ended up shipping.

I have no source to back me up. This is something I read about sometime back and it's probably lost in some deeply nested bookmark folder I'll never open.

I've heard a similar story but about SimCity.

Ah, that must have been what I was confused about. Thanks for correcting.

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