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

[Zane H. Healy]

At 6:14 PM -0800 12/7/05, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
>  > Personally I think there is a real opportunity for some software
>>  company here.
>
>Well, the situation isn't nearly that dire; there's Basilisk II and
>SheepShaver, both of which do have native OS X builds. But you have to
>run them within an emulator, which is kludgey and not nearly as
>integrated -- if not elegant -- as Classic is.

I'll have to look at SheepShaver, I've not heard of it.  Last I 
looked, Basilisk II isn't really what I'm after, though it might be 
fine for the games.

>Personally, I wonder why Apple decided to stop. I guess Steve wants to kill
>the Old Ways once and for all. I suspect that was a bigger motivation for
>the Intel switch than the promise of more powerful chips.

I don't have to wonder why they stopped, I've seen the writing on the 
wall for a while now.  How many people run Classic app's under Mac OS 
X?  I'm under the impression that most users don't even bother with 
installing the classic emulation.

A perfect example of Apple ditching legacy support is Classic 
Appletalk.  It wasn't in 10.0, and I don't think it was in 10.1, it 
was in 10.2 and 10.3, BUT, they removed it from 10.4.  Once they'd 
added it in, how much trouble was it to keep it in there???? 
Granted, for most people this didn't cause problems, but it's caused 
one person I know of to move to Linux, and it caused me to have to 
spend some serious time upgrading Samba on my VMS server, as I use 
Appletalk to allow my Mac to access my VMS box.  BTW, I'm back on 
10.3 and probably will be for a while, but that's because I think 
10.4 is a waste of resources, and 10.3 does all I need.  Until I need 
to run an app that requires 10.4, I don't think I'll be upgrading 
(and I bought 10.4 the day it came out)!

As for why Apple is switching to Intel, it's my *personal* belief 
it's for their laptops.

			Zane


-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
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|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
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