Apple ahead of schedule 3150
There was limited compatibility even here, though it was indeed far from the standards MS would later maintain.
It was possible to write a program that would run on both, unmodified. You had to do some trickery, to tolerate the differences between the 8080 and the 8086 CPUs, but the MS-DOS loader supported CP-M's COM executable format, and the APIs were close.
Perhaps you are a business using a bespoke application in Hypercard. Ooops- not anymore!
This kind of thing really blocks Apple from enterprise markets, of course.
Except as a Windows retailer, perhaps. :D
Having to replace them in the first place is a problem; Windows users don't have to do that nearly as much.
Easy is relative. It's certainly a lot easier than Carbonization was by all accounts. But it's still a major testing effort at the least, and usually more.
This is perhaps true on the Mac, but developers would rather be improving their products, not porting them.
First of all, why not? That old Mac still runs, right? Second, Hypercard having gone away years ago...
You will observe that many Mac apps are still Carbon-based, because their developers do not want to spend the effort to port to Cocoa. They've better things to do.
It is possible to mitigate the impact of porting, but its still better to do less of it rather than more of it.
And most products do not get ported to nearly the extent that Shockwave was.
Absolutely. I can see the smoke rising from your G3's case from here! :D
Harvey Goldstein I could have sworn that was no longer on my site. Oh well. You mentioned something that happened in 1979, on a night when I wasn't sober...
So you do have a Clbuttic app you'll have to abandon when you go to Intel- and maybe you will delay that upgrade because of it.
You may need to buy a replaceument. That's a bummer.
On Windows, you would not have to. Your DOS and Win16 painting programs would still work. Even in Vista.
No. Microsoft did this *once*, though even then they provided viewers and translators to help. Most of the time, they keep the same file format precisely so that downlevel users can open uplevel documents.
No. Microsoft keeps Office compatible several generations back.
Office XP still supports Windows 98. See what I mean about a slow transition?
This part is true. MS OS upgrades generally up the system requirements enough that you may well be wise to buy a new box. Apple is quite the opposite, or has been so far.
It's mostly just the FUD that Mac users tell each other; but it doesn't help, because nearly everyone uses Windows, and knows that it's not this bad.