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Comment by out_of_protocol

6 months ago

Windows 95 was released... well, in 1995. In 2025 you can run apps targeting W95 just fine (and many 16-bit apps with some effort)

21 comments

out_of_protocol

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slavapestov  6 months ago

> In 2025 you can run apps targeting W95 just fine (and many 16-bit apps with some effort)

FWIW, Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.

  • out_of_protocol  6 months ago

    Yes. Still, there are ways to do it anyway, from Dosbox to WineVDM. Unlike MacOS where having even 32 bit app (e.g. half of Steam games that supported Macos to begin with) means you're fucked

    • nomel  6 months ago

      You can use dosbox and x86 virtual machines just fine in macOS (with the expected performance loss) right now, without Rosetta. macOS is still Turing complete.

      3 replies →

  • jack_tripper  6 months ago

    >Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.

    Which isn't an issue since Windows 95 was not a 16-bit OS, that was MS-DOS. For 16-bit DOS apps there's virtualization things like DOSbox or even HW emulators.

K7PJP  6 months ago

This isn't a new or unique move; Apple has never prioritized backwards compatibility.

If you're a Mac user, you expect this sort of thing. If running neglected software is critical to you, you run Windows or you keep your old Macs around.

  • torstenvl  6 months ago

    It's a bizarre assumption that this is about "neglected software."

    A lot of software is for x64 only.

    If Rosetta2 goes away, Parallels support for x64 binaries in VMs likely goes away too. Parallels is not neglected software. The x64 software you'd want to run on Parallels are not neglected software.

    This is a short-sighted move. It's also completely unprecedented; Apple has dropped support for previous architectures and runtimes before, but never when the architecture or runtime was the de facto standard.

    https://docs.parallels.com/parallels-desktop-developers-guid...

  • timw4mail  6 months ago

    I seem to remember 68k software working (on PowerPC Macs) until Classic was killed off in Leopard? I'm likely misremembering the length of time, but it seems like that was the longest backwards-compatibility streak Apple had.

delusional  6 months ago

There's a lot of Win95 software that you can't run too. Microsoft puts a lot of work into their extensive backlog of working software. It's not just "good engineering" it's honest to god fresh development.

reddalo  6 months ago

That's not a good thing for other reasons; e.g. there are a lot of inconsistencies in modern Windows, like pieces of Windows 3.1 still in Windows 11.

  • Kwpolska  6 months ago

    There are leftovers from older versions of macOS and severely neglected apps in Tahoe too. Sure, they might have been given a new icon, or adopted the new system styling, but they have not been updated for ages.