Replying to a message of Ross Cassell to Bob Ackley:

 RC> Hello Bob!

 RC> 13 Aug 09 03:34, you wrote to me:

 RC>>> What flabbergasts me is that Vista had one of the longest
 RC>>> development stages and the third party software and hardware folk
 RC>>> where still lax as hell in getting patches and updates out there
 RC>>> that would allow their products to run with Vista, as if Microsoft
 RC>>> should be held responsible for the coding lapses of others.

 BA>> M$ should be held responsible for not making their OS backward
 BA>> compatible.

 RC> Vista was coded to address the glaring holes that got exposed by XP,
 RC> the biggest hole was the component that sat in between the keyboard
 RC> and the chair.

That's also the slowest component in any computer system - and has been since
the 8080 chip and CP/M.

 RC> Gone are the days that computer users all only well versed geeks with
 RC> loads of street/cyber smarts.

True.  Many people who have and attempt to use computers shouldn't even be 
allowed to be in the same room with one.

 RC> Just yesterday, I installed a Linksys wireless network card into a
 RC> Vista PC, the driver was written for XP.

 RC> When I took one of my machines from XP to Vista, one that I was using
 RC> for my Fidonet reading node, all the Fido software, binkd mailer,
 RC> tosser, reader, compression programs, nodelist updaters, all
 RC> continued to work.

 RC> What wont work are programs that made specific system calls that got
 RC> changed in Vista.

There's a neat little driver for OS/2 called Odin.  It translates WIN32 system 
calls into OS/2 calls, and translates the results from OS/2 back into WIN32 -
so that WIN32 applications can run in native mode (without an emulator) under
OS/2.

 RC> and change is something many of you people detest.

 RC> 64 bit computing is gaining popularity and will be more mainstream in
 RC> the next few years, it is already in widespread use for machines sold
 RC> with 4gb of ram or more. Guess what isnt going to be natively
 RC> compatible any longer?? DOS! (One could virtualize it or run a
 RC> emulator like DOSBOX)

 RC> How many imcompatibilities were there when XP came out? Even though XP
 RC> could run many DOS apps, those apps that had to control the hardware
 RC> directly were left fluttering in the wind.

My point was simply that if M$ *wanted* backward compatibility it would provide
it.  IBM has done exactly that in the mainframe world for the past forty plus years.

But M$ does *not* want backward compatibility, it wants users to keep *having* to
purchase new software, hopefully from them.  And it has the OEMs locked in to
providing the latest and greatest whiz-bang from them - even though the vast majority
of users don't need most of it.  Most home users would be perfectly satisfied with a
486/66 and Windows 3.1 if the applications did what the users wanted them to.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+