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>Interesting tidbit about IBM. I remember writing Assembly on Series 360 using punch cards (not fun!). Have they kept their promise? What would happen if they didn't? Do people still remember, or is IBM waiting for a generation shift ;-)

Yes - for their mainframes - they certainly did keep it.

What would happen if they didn't?... I think the Y2K issue is informative here. The real root of the Y2K problem was not so much that saving 2 digits of very expensive DASD space per date field saved lots of $$$. Rather it was that these programs were old (20+ years usually) and had been left using the same 'standard'.
In other words, big businesses have a huge portfolio of very very old applications running their bread-and-butter services.

Now, of course, companies small and big have exploited MS services for many of their core applications. If MS delivered SuperWin 1.0 that was incompatible with most of their existing software you can bet they'd hear about i in spades.

Just look at the general acceptance of VISTA. MS did a terrible job of it's implementation (lack of drivers, little instruction regarding switching from prior OSs, whacky "security" relted changes, etc) and yet it is (allegedly) as compatible as any previous Windows OS.

cheers

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