Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Backwards Compatibility

Everyone always says that Windows has great backwards compatibility, and I agree. You would probably think that it would be damn near impossible to run a ten year old binary application on Linux. Well, apparently, you can . . . somewhat.

My first web browser was AOL, so I never saw the WWW when it was nothing more than a freetard commune. However, I was somewhat interested in the early history of the web, so I decided to try the first popular webbrowser, NCSA Mosaic. Since I was in Linux at the time, I tried the Linux version. After miserably failing to compile the source code, I said 'what the hell' and tried the Mosaic 2.7b static binary. I did not dare try the dynamically linked versions.

You know what, it actually ran. The little splash screen displayed, and I was presented with a fugly browser. It did not support deleting individual elements of text, so if you made one typing error, you had to start over, and the cursor looked like ass, but what do you expect from a mid-90s Unix application? There was just one problem, IT COULD NOT BROWSE THE WEB!!!

So, I decided to reboot to Windows and try the Windows version, and you know what, it COULD browse the web (well, at least the Mosaic compatible parts like http://home.mcom.com).

Windows: 1
Linux: 0

Thanks for playing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wtf, i tried that on Debian lenny, the M$ windoze version in wine, which ran quit well fyi. Thanks for that little taste of history. Informative!

Anonymous said...

(Itworksforme)TM

IPlayDirectX10GamesOnLinux said...

"Fugly", "freetard"... You must be 10 years old. If not, talk like an adult. Oh, and quit whining about an OS that you're too dumb to learn about.