> The tradition goes back to SimCity, which only ran on Windows 95 because Microsoft wrote special code for it... Yes, Microsoft modified its OS just to cover up one game’s bug... The SimCity hack was a one-off
The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".
The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".
Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ though I can't find a smoking gun. I definitely remember an article about Intuit doing something some dumb they had to keep an internal API around reporting the wrong value or something like that.
Here's the reference to the testing scheme that Windows 95 came up with from Raymond Chen's blog - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...
From an article on this[0]:
> On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
The article’s content is generally quite weak, could probably have been covered in an old school tweet with screenshots and nothing of value would have been lost.
The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.
I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.
It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.
One may even speculate the author got some, or a lot of ... "help", if it's even a real author.
Nothing wrong with getting help from AI as long as you’re applying good and qualified judgment on what parts of its help is decent.
They didn't. They just rephrased someone else's blog series.
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good thing the comment wasn't swarmed in ads
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The call is coming from inside the house, buddy.
We know a lot of this from the Windows NT leaks, its a shame that clearly Windows was a drastically better maintained OS than today. In the NT leaks there were comments about things like adding support for things like Delphi to ensure it compiles.
I have read some similar things about macOS having app-specific fixes for popular apps.
It might have been this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034413
I worked for this place that made a security auditing tool. The agent had to know which version of Windows it was running on. When Microsoft came out with a new version, the agent didn't know what it was running on, since it hadn't been updated to include that version. I forget what it did in response, but it didn't run right - maybe just terminated?
Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.
Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!
This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)
How did they identify your software? Could you guys produce a sibling program whose job is to identify the windows version and notify the main program?
I believe they identified it by the name of the executable. IIRC, we did exactly what your second sentence says.
If you look at the compatibility tool you'll see multiple checks not only executable name match. It can check version headers and other signatures.
Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?