Microsoft sunsets their stuff all the time. It's just that they're competing with Google and Apple now, so they're actively trying to push this line to differentiate where they can.
Try to use only a ten year old printer driver sometime. It's a pain. Linux executes 20 year old code with no problem, as long as you kept all the pieces. How do they do it? Never merge anything that breaks known user space. Easy in theory, hard work in practice.
If you want to run applications from the 90s, you're likely to have more success with dosbox or wine than with a plain Windows. Didn't Microsoft completely give up on backwards emulation a few years ago and started virtualizing it instead, with mixed success?
Of course, if you really want something famous for backwards compatibility, look at OS/400 and z/OS. It's all layers of emulation from the hardware up in order to guarantee that an investment in that platform is future proof. It's all expensive in the end of course, as someone has to pay for it, but they live well on the customers who value such things. Running 50 year old code there is commonplace.
IBM i is stellar in design, compatibility, quality, efficiency, reliability, consistency and security. x86 and Linux pale in comparison.
I wish IBM hadn't fenced it so much like a walled garden. Had they issued inexpensive or free licenses for OS/400 targeted to students and developers, maybe also an emulator to develop conveniently on x86, their i platform would probably be more commonplace now, with quite a bit more available software.
What is killing their platform is not the price but mostly the lack of skills and software. And it's probably too late now to change course.
I'm a long time software engineer and do quite a bit of devops both in cloud but also have significant experience building on-prem and datacenter server clusters.
I have never heard of IBM i until this moment right now.
I assume this is specifically for their Power-series hardware? I've only ever seen Linux on Power hardware...
You may have known IBM i under a different name such as eSeries or AS/400 as it has gone through many renaming.
Yes, it currently targets their Power series, although it's fairly hardware independent. As a matter of fact AS/400 binaries don't even care what CPU they run on, as there are several abstraction layers underneath, namely XPF, TIMI and SLIC. It's a bit like a native, hardware-based JVM with the OS being also the SDK. Another peculiarity is that everything is an object in "i", including libraries, programs and files.
But mostly, it requires close to no sysadmin. Just turn it on, start the services and leave it alone for years if needed.
Microsoft dropped 16 bit support on 64 bit machines, but that was becomes 16 bit support on 32 bit was already using emulation/virtualisation, and so did 32 bit on 64 bit. Emulating a 16 bit emulator inside the 32 bit emulator would be too much, even for Microsoft.
Microsoft does drop backwards compatibility sometimes, usually because the backwards compatibility layer leaves a huge security risk.
Yes, old printer drivers yes for Windows can be a problem, often because of the 32 to 64 bit switch, I have that exact problem with an old printer that still works but can't get it to install on 64 bit.
20 year old software is rarely a problem, I'm running Office XP on Windows 10 without problems.
Try to use only a ten year old printer driver sometime. It's a pain. Linux executes 20 year old code with no problem, as long as you kept all the pieces. How do they do it? Never merge anything that breaks known user space. Easy in theory, hard work in practice.
If you want to run applications from the 90s, you're likely to have more success with dosbox or wine than with a plain Windows. Didn't Microsoft completely give up on backwards emulation a few years ago and started virtualizing it instead, with mixed success?
Of course, if you really want something famous for backwards compatibility, look at OS/400 and z/OS. It's all layers of emulation from the hardware up in order to guarantee that an investment in that platform is future proof. It's all expensive in the end of course, as someone has to pay for it, but they live well on the customers who value such things. Running 50 year old code there is commonplace.