Lord_Majestic - 5:50 pm on Oct 15, 2008 (gmt 0)

The Wine project has no relation with backward compatibility - its an emulation project

Err? The whole point of Wine is to ensure that legacy Windows software runs fine - I don't actually think they emulate anything, they re-implemented APIs, it does not matter really because the point is that it is very hard to support legacy software and Microsoft did a very good job with it taking us from 16 bit computing to 64 bit one.

Given that Windows was built from an extended DOS, running DOS programs does not count as innovation.

Bill Gates said at the time that Windows 95 is not ready if it can't run well DOOM game which was DOS app, Windows 3.1 could not do it, but Windows 95 did, is that not an innovation?

It's hardly accurate to claim that DOS and Windows memory management are totally different

It's very accurate - 16-bit MS-DOS memory management was poor, even 16-bit Windows did it better and finally 32-bit version was doing it okay - all that had to happen while supporting old poorly written applications, there is no other OS manufacturer who achieved that/

Microsoft were too useless to create an extended DOS themselves (something other software companies managed with little difficulty).

DOS way (like Unix command line) was dead end that would not have allowed computers to be used by normal people, without GUI like in Windows I think we would not see computers spread around so well so quickly and Microsoft was right to avoid creating yet another compatibility problem by creating stop gap measure like extended DOS.

IMO.

[edited by: Lord_Majestic at 5:52 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2008]