Cursed Compatibility

Someone demoed upgrading from MS-DOS all the way to Windows 11, one version at a time.

3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11. No crashes. Decades of operating systems connected in a single line. ME was a terrible OS. That aside, Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility is obsessive. They carry everything forward as if cursed. Win32 APIs still work after 30 years. The fear of breaking compatibility is baked into the corporate culture.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn't seem that interested in compatibility. PowerPC to Intel. Intel to Apple Silicon. They cut off entire architectures. The original MacBook Air stunned me with how thin it was. It ran an Intel chip. To Apple, hardware history is not something you inherit. It is something you leave behind. They sacrifice the past to optimize for the future. Which approach is right depends on where you stand.

But compatibility has a dark side.

A while back, illegal mobile base stations made the news. A device mounted in a car would exploit the 2G radio standard, broadcasting spoofed SMS messages to nearby phones. The attack works because modern smartphones can still fall back to a decades-old 2G protocol. Compatibility with an obsolete standard becomes a vulnerability. The messages stopped arriving recently. Probably someone got arrested.

Maintaining compatibility is a virtue. But it means carrying every past vulnerability forward with it. Microsoft knows this better than anyone.