Legacy apps in Windows/OS X was Re: Old MS-DOS & Win Software

[Cameron Kaiser]

> What's really water under the bridge is 16-bit mode in Windows.  Vista
> doesn't support it, period.   Maybe someone will write a 16-bit emulator
> for Vista and we'll get to keep our old apps in some form.
> 
> I can understand MS wanting to deprecate a lot of the PC legacy features.
> NT startup has to be one of the more complex computing tasks around and I
> suspect that the folks in Redmond have envied Apple for a long time in not
> having to accomodate all sorts of bizarre departures from the norm in
> hardware.  All of which has me wondering how much longer things like
> 8237-type-DMA will be part of the PC platform. 

They won't envy Apple for much longer. Based on the specs for Rosetta (the
JIT PPC->x86 translator for the impending Intel Macs), it will only run
PPC applications written for the G3 under Carbon. That means Classic apps
-- including 68K apps -- will probably die in the future.

-- 
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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- I'm in Pittsburgh. Why am I here? -- Harold Urey, Nobel laureate -----------