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I worked on device connectivity in Windows core OS division in the Longhorn/Vista push. I came from the Linux and SunOS world before that. It was simply crazy at the dedication and effort put in to make Windows backwards compatible with whatever old broken and poorly behaving USB and printer device. We would have no-named cheap web cams that didn't function to USB spec but "worked" in Windows 98 that needed to work in Vista while still implementing new secure driver models that broke all cheap device assumptions. It was a long hard trek to get all those devices working.

by Grombobulous1 hours ago|

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Did you have to procure a physical library of random devices for that kind of work?

by okanat1 hours ago|

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Raymond Chen actually talks about this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240521-00/?p=10...

They basically had a cart populated with random-ass stuff they found in computer shops to the maximum of the USB spec supported wirh hubs. They inserted the hub and watched Windows crash until everything is fixed and worked, then they started yanking it when it was still discovering devices.

by direwolf201 hours ago|

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Don't know about that commentor but Microsoft definitely had one, since Raymond Chen (main source this AI stole from) talked about it.

by mahboi36 minutes ago|

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It's also incredible how quickly a Mac will stop being able to run Mac apps.

by paulryanrogers31 minutes ago|

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This was shocking to me as a gamer who loved Windows and had to use Mac. Rosetta helped for a while. Nowadays it feels like an intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up.

by mahboi21 minutes ago|

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Oh yeah, I just occasionally play whatever few games happen to work on Mac, and that's fine for me, but the default assumption is that Mac and games don't mix. Even stuff like csgo that "worked for Mac" ran significantly worse on it.

by nostrademons1 hours ago|

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My kid's a big fan of original StarCraft, which is now going on 28 years old.

I think you need an emulator to run Civ1, though. My kid was asking if we could try it and I'm like "I don't think I can find that on Steam..."

by toast01 hours ago|

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Civ1 was for DOS, but CivNet is almost Civ1 and was for windows... But maybe win16 and you'd need winevdm or something if your install is 64-bit.

by vee-kay34 minutes ago|

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AFAIK, you can run Civ1 (and other 16-bit games & applications) on Windows 10/11 in 3 ways:

1. Run CivWin on WineVDM: WineVDM, also known as OTVDM (Old 16-bit Windows Virtual Machine), is a compatibility layer that allows users to run many legacy 16-bit Windows applications on modern 64-bit Windows systems. CivWin is the Windows re-release of Civ1, that's recommended due to its high resolution support (e.g., you can play it in HD with cool mods) and some people like the final multiplayer CivNet release too. Credit: @Blake00 on this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/using-winevdm-to-play... https://winevdm.com/does-winevdm-work-on-windows-11/

2. DosBox (get the D-Fend Reloaded frontend/GUI, it contains DosBox): https://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.io/ https://www.dosbox.com/mown/index.php

3. VirtualBox or VMWare (virtual machines solution) to install and run a copy of Windows 95/98.

Note that Microsoft removed support for 16-bit subsystems from 64-bit editions of Windows many years ago, beginning with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

by expedition322 hours ago|

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Also Windows has a huge community of people who will help you.

With Linux you're stuck trying to decipher the ramblings of neckbeards.

by mahboi38 minutes ago|

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No, you're almost completely screwed if you're at the point of looking for non-trivial Windows help online. But you're also way less likely to be in that situation with Windows vs with Linux.

by officeplant2 hours ago|

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it's not 1999 anymore, we've already moved past the golden era of stackoverflow and forums to support Linux & Windows questions into a new dawn of poorly sourced reddit bot comments.

by Spivak2 hours ago|

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I really want to believe you and that I've just missed the magic support forums but trying to find answers to problems on Windows is just a million forums of the same essentially "turn it off and on again" advice

Linux forums might be obtuse but at least they'll have actual technical details about the problem. Almost without fail any "fix" they propose won't work on your system because it's for a different distro that was EoL 5 years ago but they'll at least give you something to work with.

by RajT882 hours ago|

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I know what you're talking about. Microsoft is so large, that the smallest of gaps are enough for ecosystems to form around and provide people a living.

For example, people trawling the Microsoft Q&A forum for low hanging fruit to provide advice to and build out their little home computer repair business profile.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/tags/824/windows-h...

Some of these answers are really dubious. Some of these questions are really dubious.

by mahboi33 minutes ago|

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Yeah this completely matches my experience. Questions lacking essential details or followup, answers that are some kind of professional help who don't actually know anything.

by xp842 hours ago|

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I found all of the above to be lacking years ago tbh no matter what platform the advice was for. I'm really glad now that I can just go back and forth with even a free-tier chatbot for 2-3 messages to fix any fixable problem, or just have a cursor agent tinker with it interactively until it's fixed.