This makes me wonder, having seen another thread on this recently, how much of this is due to layer after layer of abstractions piled onto one another. Given the demand for backwards compatibility, & the never-ending efforts that show up to port everything old to any new platform (with all the support that has to be baked in to make that happen in many cases), how likely is it that this can be avoided, or prevented from getting worse in the future?
You can run DOS applications on any computer architecture and on any operating system. Modern software is much worse at backwards compatibility than software from the past.
The reason for that of course is that DOS stopped changing almost 30 years ago. But, yes, Dosbox and other DOS emulators are great virtual machines if you do not want to have to rewrite your software every six months because some API changed, and they run almost everywhere.
