Windows 7 details to be released

[NickFitz]

Backward compatibility for previous binaries and apps won't be there either (apparently).

I find that unlikely - Microsoft have an almost religious devotion to backwards compatibility. You can supposedly take an early Eighties copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and run it on Vista. There are a very few points where compatibility with some of the sneakier hardware-based tricks has been broken, but they affect almost nothing.

Just the other year I dug out a 5-1/4" floppy drive, stuck it in a suitably old PC, and was able to successfully run a game I wrote in 8086 assembly language in 1987, using precisely zero MS-DOS capabilities beyond the file system, under XP. XP's MS-DOS-and-legacy-hardware emulation coped with all the direct manipulation of the CGA (Colour Graphics Adapter), including some real silly buggery with the 6845 CRTC (Cathode Ray Tube Controller), perfectly. All the stuff that grabbed the keyboard hardware and handled its hardware interrupts directly: just worked. The bizarre manipulations of the 8253 PIT (Programmable Interrupt Timer) to get sampled sounds out of the original internal speaker designed to just go "beep": worked perfectly (including the weird stuff I had to do to keep the RAM refresh happening).

I wouldn't be surprised if they adopt some strategy for keeping support for all the old stuff hidden away on disk until you need it, rather than baking it into the core OS as they did with the Win32 API, but I very much doubt they'll abandon it entirely. Their big corporate customers - the ones with 100,000 seats worldwide and a bunch of internal apps that require support for an undocumented function in MS-DOS 3.3 - will still want that support, and they drive Microsoft's strategy a damn sight more than the consumer market does.

[Fred Bloggs]

Might as well switch to Linux or OS-X if your old apps won't run and keep XP for the legacy stuff.

Yeah, I'm thinking the same myself ATM. I have 5 XP and 1 Vista PC's. I think that USB WiFi dongle support is a but flaky in Linux distro's presently for example?

[miffy]

Oh Goody. Will this version work with my hardware like XP used to ?

Not a chance.

Backward compatibility for previous binaries and apps won't be there either (apparently). I can't see the speed of adoption being particularly great if that's the case.

Might as well switch to Linux or OS-X if your old apps won't run and keep XP for the legacy stuff.

[churkus]

in my opinion Windows reached its peak with XP. Vista is an over bloated GUI experience and doesnt really offer any improvements over XP, quite the opposite.

The only way I see WIndows advancing is if it goes modular like Linux where you can compile your own kernel, in which case, Linux is a better bet anyway.

Ill stick with XP for now, and for ever.

[Diver]

Oh Goody. Will this version work with my hardware like XP used to ?

Stop being so naive

[bogeyman]

Writing on the blog the two senior engineers on the project, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, said this was because Microsoft did not want to talk up features that never make it to the final product.

Is this the same Microsoft that endlessly talked up the goodies in Longhorn (aka Vista) that never showed, like WinFS?

The main point of Vista seems to have been to embed DRM as deeply as possible into the operating system. Somehow I doubt they'll be ripping that crap out again with 7.

Glad I don't have to use or develop for Windows much these days.

I'm now enjoying life as a smug Mac bigot

[EqualOpportunities]

Oh Goody. Will this version work with my hardware like XP used to ?

Unlikely.

[s2budd]

Oh Goody. Will this version work with my hardware like XP used to ?

[BrilloPad]

"Microsoft has said that engineering information about Windows 7 will be shared with attendees at two technical conferences it runs."

I bet NF will be there to pull it apart.....

[Diver]

A first glimpse at the technology inside the next version of Windows will be given in October.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7562720.stm