Comment by myself248
7 years ago
> platform and OS combo that could continue to run their software from a few years back
So, here's a thought for ya: MS Excel from back then won't run on anymore, 16-bit apps aren't recognized by modern Windows, etc.
But a .XLS created back then sure will. And lots of business logic is codified in Excel spreadsheets.
I posit that .XLS is a more stable platform than Windows itself.
>So, here's a thought for ya: MS Excel from back then won't run on anymore
Here's a thought for you: it actually does run on Windows 10.
In particular, Excel 3 for Windows 3 installs and runs on Windows 10 out of the box. Here's a screenshot on my system[1]
Again, let me emphasize: this is software with a GUI written in 1991 for an OS released in 1990 which just works on Windows 10 in 2018 -- no VM required.
This is the second major release of MSOffice for the PC. The previous release, Excel 2, was running under Windows 2.0, which nobody wants to remember, and which is indeed not supported.
On the other hand, its installer - a DOS program - runs fine because DOS programs still run in windows 10.
The compatibility breaks on 64-bit releases of Windows. But all the major versions are available in 32-bit, which you can run on any hardware you can put the 64-bit version on.
[1]https://imgur.com/hqIpsbZ
> MS Excel from back then won't run on anymore, 16-bit apps aren't recognized by modern Windows, etc.
They certainly will run, even if only through emulation or API conversion. In fact, that's probably what modern MS Excel does to old XLS docs, which is convert them to an in memory format that probably more closely resembles The Office Open XML format than the Excel Binary File Format (the extension may or may not change, but the format did).
> I posit that .XLS is a more stable platform than Windows itself.
Well, ignoring that we've drifted quite far from hardware, I would say that Excel (which would be the actual platform, not the container format) is not a general purpose computing platform (at least not a feasible one), not something that necessarily defined what architecture is being used, except tangentially.