>Yeah, but it's unreasonable to expect hardware makers to create drives for 15-year-old
>operating systems....

Not if that operating system powers one-third of the world's desktops, and that "one-third" number was a lot higher until recently when Microsoft began forcing people out. It would've been closer to 50% had WinXP not sunsetted, and had WinXP continued to be sold. Very few companies would've jumped forward with some other OS (at least that's true of the ones I've spoken to, the only reason most of them state they will move forward is because they have no choice, and people only go into Win8 kicking and screaming, except for a small handful of people which I find very interesting).


>My point was that for Microsoft to keep supporting XP, they'd have to keep making sure it
>worked on wide varieties of hardware. It's just not as simple as write it once and forget it.
>Tamar

The driver model is not so different that you're talking about a ground-up effort in any case. The hardware manufacturers would be able to use the same code base for the various OSes in most cases, and with a few #ifdef..#endif blocks. And the market and users themselves would be the telling component there. Early adopters would take a risk and possibly get burned, but there would be incentive there for a particular hardware maker to support the older hardware for a wider avenue for sales.

You are jumping over a lot by suggesting that the leading edge is the only place to be. For computer software, especially on hardware that's backward compatible with the machines of 20+ years ago, able to run those old software programs unchanged ... that's simply an insane position to have, Tamar, because software doesn't wear out. It's not like a 20 year old car that needs to be replaced due to stress on the steel, and worn out parts.

Software works because it works. It is digital and does not wear out over time. It works even if it's not running on the latest thing. It works because the logic is correct, and the mechanisms to bring it forward to a human-based UI exist through the hardware system. It doesn't require more than that to be useful. The company I work for is still maintaining FoxPro for Windows 2.6 apps written in the early 90s. They do this because there is a huge base of logic written into those programs, and they work. We've begun migrating them to VFP9 in the past couple of years, and I've had to write several custom converters to get them there, but they all still work without any changes (thanks to the converter which handles the handful of things mechanically). They still write and maintain the code in FPW 2.6, and the converter handles the migration forward to VFP9.

It's completely doable to maintain systems on aging software provided the hardware continues to work. And there is still a lot of hardware being sold that runs on XP, and even Windows 2000.