Now there’s a headline that I never thought I’d write. Generally speaking, I have a pretty active dislike for Windows, mostly because the UI & QC are so poor. Don’t even get me started on things like adding a printer under Windows… Anyway, the idea here is not to try to ignite a Mac vs. PC hubub, because those generally end up being pretty stupid religious wars.
But, there is something that Windows does much better than a Mac. That thing is this: backward compatibility.
I have a new Intel Mac. It’s very nice, and it’s very fast, and Leopard is pretty cool, but I’m not running Leopard full-time because there’s software I need that isn’t Leopard-happy (SPSS, I’m looking mostly at you). Heck, I’m still struggling with the transition to Intel, which has orphaned other software I use regularly (that’d be MCL).
The real thing moving to an Intel Mac seriously orphaned, though, is Classic. Why? Well, I’m not much of a gamer, but there is one game which I enjoy and was really my only reason to run Classic: Civilization II. (Really, I’ll stop when I finish this next turn.) With the Intel Mac, no more Classic, so no more Civ2. Now, Civ4 runs really nicely in Mac OS X, and it’s a fine game–but I still miss Civ2. I had started looking into SheepShaver, but that was clearly going to require work and I hadn’t gotten to it.
Then, I was in a half-price bookstore, and on a software shelf, for a whole $3.98, was Civilization II for the PC. And then it hit me: I could play Civ by running Windows! Oh, but the game is dated 1996… would 11-year old software for Win95 really still run on XP. Answer: yes, perfectly, without a hitch. I just works. Heck, I don’t even need to boot Windows, it runs in emulation on VMWare just great. Runs faster than the Classic version did on my dual-2.7GHz G5, too.
Apple has done a great job transitioning across two OSs and three hardware architectures in the time I’ve been a Mac user (that’s 20 years now!)—I doubt Microsoft could have pulled it off nearly as well—but there’s a cost. There’s a lot of software that’s three or four years old that I can’t run on a new Mac. But 11 year old Windows software? No problem.
There’s some irony in there somewhere.
Sorry, got to go, the Sioux are attacking St. Louis again…