Vista Question

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: BD2003
I personally wish theyd start over nearly completely from scratch like OSX, but at the end of the day, thats only practical when you have such a closed hardware ecosystem like apple.

Apple did it right, but they did keep Classic (MacOS 9) support around until fairly recently, and they *still* have PPC emulation for OS X applications running on Intel.

How good was the OS 9 support anyway? Was it 100% rock solid, or buggy? I assume the PPC emulation is a much simpler deal. I remember many years ago when OS X first dropped, you basically had to dual boot between the two constantly.

And bear in mind that OS X itself is borrowed, in huge, massive chunks, from several Unix variants.

This is true, but I just cant imagine MS doing the same.

I'd imagine there has to be a way where they can reuse a huge portion of the current code, while taking an axe to a decade or so of built up bloat dealing with software + hardware compatibility. I still hear on the grapevine that thats the plan for the next edition of windows, but I've been hearing that for years. If they were only to sell it with preconfigured OEM PCs for a few months, I'd imagine it would go over fairly well though.

 

[dclive]

OS 9 support was world-class if you had a PPC; apps that didn't work were fairly few and far between. For example, *Quake* worked! OS 9 emulation was not included in the OS if you had an Intel Mac.

You can't imagine MS doing the same ... what? OS X borrowed Unix; Windows NT borrowed Dave Cutler's VMS OS, the DOS naming conventions / directory conventions, and plenty of other things from plenty of other people. WOW (Win16) and DosVDMs (for DOS apps) can't be *that* difficult. And the OS/2 subsystem was in Windows NT, and I believe it was optional for Windows 2000. And you can easily add other subsystems to Windows too - someone just has to develop it. MS did a UNIX-like subsystem not so long ago...

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: dclive
OS 9 support was world-class if you had a PPC; apps that didn't work were fairly few and far between. For example, *Quake* worked! OS 9 emulation was not included in the OS if you had an Intel Mac.

You can't imagine MS doing the same ... what? OS X borrowed Unix; Windows NT borrowed Dave Cutler's VMS OS, the DOS naming conventions / directory conventions, and plenty of other things from plenty of other people. WOW (Win16) and DosVDMs (for DOS apps) can't be *that* difficult. And the OS/2 subsystem was in Windows NT, and I believe it was optional for Windows 2000. And you can easily add other subsystems to Windows too - someone just has to develop it. MS did a UNIX-like subsystem not so long ago...

I dont quite understand the whole deal with unix and who owns it, but I'd think that any mixing of windows and *nix is just not going to go down well with lawyers and what not. Also given the way MS likes to force you into using proprietary microsoft everything, I cant imagine theyd be inclined to borrow too much from someone else. Theyd much rather buy out or run their competitors into the ground with unfair business practices.

I could just be completely clueless though.

 

[dclive]

http://technet.microsoft.com/e.../library/bb463212.aspx

Microsoft will let you run Unix apps - it just becomes another compile target, just like MacOS X, Red Hat, etc....

 

[clickynext]

I'm on 64 bit and haven't any any problems with drivers or games compared to 32-bit.