As an experiment, I started this morning with Delphi 3, (we are talking Windows 95 era stuff there), worked fine, upgraded it to Delphi 5, (which we had on Windows NT), also fine. My ancient Salford Fortran compiler, installed from floppy disks, works fine. It is odd isn't it, that only the MS stuff doesn't. We have customers that we are supposed to support which have stuff like that. Makes a great deal of sense trying to support them when we are unable to run their era gear doesn't it.
Last edited by Fossaw; 11-02-2016 at 03:05 AM.
I'm not surprised MS stuff doesn't work since they so heavily invest in their "cool" new techs involving tons of registry garbage that's a pain to install and uninstall and fails regularly. Nevertheless, that stuff is 15-20 years old, so you shouldn't expect it to work. Now we're in the situation where using such old software requires specialized software and support, which costs a lot of extra money. I can't really help you. Your customers have themselves to blame and you're just going to have to find a way to deal with them.
Originally Posted by Adak
I feel justified, not unreasonable, criticising MS.
>>>
I'm not surprised MS stuff doesn't work since they so heavily invest in their "cool" new techs involving tons of registry garbage that's a pain to install and uninstall and fails regularly.
<<<
And you would appear to agree with me.
No, I don't agree with you. Out of every software on the planet, I feel like it's not very surprising that Microsoft's software don't work after 15 years. I AM surprised that old stuff like Borland still works, however. That does not mean I agree with you.
So I feel like you are being unreasonable.
FYI: Many installers of 32 bit software used 16 bit installers!
The 16 bit installers do NOT run on Windows 64 bit OSes.
Tim S.
"...a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are,in short, a perfect match.." Bill Bryson
Elysia, you are free to think whatever you like.
Fossaw, working or not working, it is a mistake to run legacy software on modern systems. Especially if said software are compilers. The installation process is just a small and insignificant part of the whole process of using a compiler. And with development software like Delphi 3, you are very likely to find all sorts of unexpected results when debugging, profiling, compiling, or linking anything more complex than the simplest projects.
Legacy software development tools are best ran on those legacy systems that guaranteed full support for them, regardless of whether you can successfully run them on more modern systems. This is so because the more modern system make no such guarantee and that makes it completely unreliable as a platform for software development of the type you need to make. Surely reliability and support is something that you as a software developer can empathize with. So, you may wish to look at Microsoft as being in the bad, but in fact the fact their old software isn't installing is a good thing and they are doing you a favor.
As already advised, the perfect environment to support legacy systems based on old software development tools is to do that support from within VMs with an old operating system that supports those tools. And if you guys are MSDN members, the ISOs available at the download center for all early editions of Windows up to and including Windows XP have been slipstreamed with all the system updates that were done up until their end of life. Which means you always get the best edition of whatever legacy Windows you need.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Whilst, in an ideal world, I might agree with you, when supporting customers, who are in turn supporting theirs, who are still running gear produced that long ago, using a modern compiler may introduce problems. It may, for example, have fixed faults that were not fixed in the old stuff, and that people may be relying on. It may generate opcode that will not run on 90's imbedded hardware platforms.
