Comment by kidel001

15 hours ago

I like that we are amazed by this. And yet all of my books from 34 years ago open up just fine (without cheating, no book opening emulator required!). I can even open a book on my shelf from 1896 without emulation. Not trying to troll too hard but I do think it is shocking how accustomed we've gotten to zero backwards compatibility in the world of software.

16 comments

kidel001

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anthonypasq  14 hours ago

a better example would be whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track, or fire a musketball from an M16

  • ggreer  14 hours ago

    I think the oldest cartridge that would still work in a modern firearm would be .22 Short, which is from 1857.[1] It was developed into .22 Long, which was developed into .22 Long Rifle, which new firearms are still chambered in today. It wouldn't cycle a semi-auto though. Another contender would be .38 Long Colt, which is from 1875 and will work in firearms chambered in .38 Special or .357 Magnum.

    The main causes of incompatibility were the transition from ball-and-powder to rimfire cartridges, then the transition from rimfire to centerfire. It's surprising how little firearms have changed in the past century. 9mm Parabellum is 125 years old. The Browning short recoil action (used by most handguns today) is over a century old.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.22_short

    • toyg  44 minutes ago

      > It's surprising how little firearms have changed in the past century.

      Isn't that a function of constraints in the deployment model, which are fundamentally unchanged? A soldier needs <something> with him to hit enemies and <something else> to reload it - and the simpler the better, to facilitate difficult deployments and keep costs down. I mean, the venerable Kalashnikov is still around, despite its well-known shortcomings...

      I guess we would see major developments only if we discovered/engineered materials that can perform the function in a significantly better way.

  • delta_p_delta_x  1 hour ago

    > whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track

    This quite literally happens all the time in the UK. There are heritage railways, and steam rolling stock regularly shows up on various routes as part of heritage rides.

    On the other hand, I ride almost daily on a track bed that was laid almost 180 years ago, and through tunnels and on viaducts that are equally as old. The rails, sleepers, signals, and rolling stock have all changed, no doubt, but the base infrastructure is old hat.

    The oldest bits of the London Underground are from 1863. The tunnels are exactly the same, the stations and stairways, and even some of the sign boards completely unchanged from then.

    Railways are the epitome of forever infrastructure.

  • jeroenhd  14 hours ago

    If you live in a country or region where the gauge didn't change, you can put a 1845 train on a modern track just fine. If the gauge did change, you'll need a train from another country. Standard Gauge was first applied in 1825 after all.

    • fredoralive  1 hour ago

      Although on modern railways whilst the locomotive might fit, the train might not be allowed to operate in normal mainline traffic or need modifications to be considered safe. A steam train on the British main lines needs to be retrofitted with an alphabet soup of AWS, TPWS and GSM-R, and the glacial rollout of ERTMS and in cab signalling will mean figuring out how to add a HMI display to a steam engine cab.

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  • wildzzz  14 hours ago

    Many militaries are still buying rifles that chamber a cartridge introduced in 1891 (7.62x54mmR). I'd argue a cartridge initially developed for a long bolt action rifle (Mosin-Nagant) that can now be fired out of a variant of a AK-patten select-fire bull-pup (Vepr) fits the analogy.

  • Cthulhu_  3 hours ago

    Why train when you can just walk? (yeah this a snarky remark to the grandparent comment)

  • Barrin92  14 hours ago

    >whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track

    you can do that, in fact I know that Austria still has a mid 19th century train in regular operation (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_alt_23)

    if you're looking for commuter trains a lot of early 20th century ones still operate around the world.

stkdump  6 hours ago

I think the point made here is that the application runs as if it were a modern application, even though the OS is completely unrecognizable when compared to the OS it was written for. There are other ways to run old applications on modern hardware with modern OSs, which the author would consider cheating for the purpose of TFA. Heck, I can run ancient DOS and gaming console applications on my phone if I wanted to.