Re: A Tale of Two Apples

[!smentzer@pacbell.net (Steve Mentzer)]

Try deperately, but ultimately failing to sound intelligent, Mitchell Spector 
said...
>
>In article bjblackbear@ibm.net (B.J. Major) writes...
>
>>To make an analogy that's a bit more realistic, the current crop of PC's
>>can't run the oldest PC software--or very old versions of DOS.  
>
>    Could you give some examples of old PC/XT software that will not
>run on a Pentium system? All the old 8088 titles I have seem to run
>just fine on my 486 and my brother's Pentium.


You will find incompatible software, if you look hard enough. The most common 
cause of incompatibilities is lack of foresight on the part of the programmer. 
Old software that took advantage of CGA,EGA or hercules might get confused when 
querying(sp?) the BIOS and/or hardware and seeing an MCGA or VGA adapter. Most 
of these problems caused the programs to bomb or lock up.

In addition, harware timing dependant software (games) have a hard time using 
joysticks on the PC. The use of extended memory on the PC also caused problems 
for those who didn't follow the LIMM specs. When dos 5.0 and 6.0 rolled out, 
lots of poorly written software had a hard time fitting in.

The bottom line is that POORLY written software had problems. Major titles that 
conformed to specs typically work just fine.

smentzer@pacbell.net