After bringing Objective-C to the Amiga, why not to some older Windows versions as well?
Yesterday, I got the idea to port ObjFW to Windows NT 4.0. Considering the lowest supported Windows version so far was Windows XP, this seemed like it would not be too much work. However, the biggest problem was getting a toolchain that still supports Windows NT 4.0!
[…]After the compiler no longer created binaries that had missing symbols on Windows NT 4.0 […] and a few minor changes later, all tests were running successfully.
[…]Later that evening, I wanted to take things further and thought: If we have Windows NT 4.0 now, why not Windows 98 SE as well? […] So now it was time to port everything else to the A APIs and voilà, all tests are running successfully.
The amount of effort by people to keep NT4 and NT5 working is amazing. I can use my gtx 980ti in xp (not connected to internet) just for those programs and games that work poorly in newer systems.
And with this i could do some fun stuff with my NT4 machine as well thar i could not do before.
NaGERST
Yeah, it’s cool that people are able to continue to support old platforms like that. This has gotten harder with more recent operating systems though since microsoft started blocking independent developers from installing their own drivers without microsoft’s approval & signatures. This caused problems for developers like myself on my own computer. I suspect this is going to cause bigger and bigger problems for “modern” platforms on which the owner has less access to the platform. Such owner restrictions make self-sufficiency significantly harder than in the past. And it’s not just microsoft either.
This poses challenges to future software historians. They’ll have no problem with tech from the 80s, 90s, and early 00s, but hardware locks, walled gardens, online activation, etc will probably limit what can be done to preserve our current technology in the future.