Especially for MacOs, where you can expect apps to stop working after a new new major OS versions, this is really nice. Meanwhile, Microsoft maintains an amazing degree of compatibility. I haven't tried, but I have a feeling Office 97 works in Windows 10.
Traditionally, that was the case, but recently older applications have been breaking in recent versions of windows. And windows and macos both have hacks in place to fix older versions of popular applications (ms office, adobe suite, etc.).
While Windows's backwards compatibility is sadly getting worse, it's also still pretty incredible. I can run lots of obscure Windows programs that 2+ decades old!
Mac backwards compatibility isn't as bad as some people say—I have a decade-old program that still works in Mojave, for instance—but Windows is a lot better.
The platform with awful backwards compatibility is iOS. And there, you don't even have the option to dual boot or downgrade. The fact that no one cares says something about how much we value mobile software...
Honestly, the only time ios has broken backwards compatibility is with 32->64 bit. And—not to minimize that, that is quite major, but that's pretty much the only time it's happened.
Have you ever actually tried to run early iOS apps on iOS 10?
I have. I had an iPod Touch for a couple of years as a teenager, but then left iOS until I got an iPhone in college. Once I had the iPhone, I decided to go through my purchase history and re-download the apps I'd used on my iPod, for nostalgia's sake if nothing else.
To my dismay, exceedingly few of the old apps worked, and most of those that did had major graphical glitches. (Not including apps which had been updated by the developer more recently, of course.)
I took a look, and it seems like a lot of them were removed from the App Store. If you happen to have any of these in your purchase history:
* Convertbot
* Tap Tap Revenge Classic / 2.5 / Dance
* Roland 2
There were definitely way more, but I don't remember which ones, and now that I'm on iOS 12 I can't test any of them (all 32 bit). These are the three I specifically remember not working.
