Does anyone know any good book on this subject?

:(

I invite you, and the others who commented here too, to actually watch the video i posted. You will see that while it begins in a serious manner it is actually a piece of humor. Watch it and have a good laugh as i did. ;)

Is that even valid HTML?

And what happens when those servers die? Do they still find replacement parts and people that knows how to fix them? And if yes... for how long?

Because yes, you can certainly still learn COBOL... but what about finding replacement parts for an old server that soon enough no one will even know how to fix?

Yes, one thing that Microsoft always got right was backwards-compatibility. It is amazing that softwares made for Windows 20 years ago still work (almost) flawlessy on current versions of Windows.

Unfortunately this also meant supporting bugs and broken softwares... such as the example of SimCity:

The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This is dangerous. By supporting this type of broken behavior you are opening the way to malware that could take advantage of those bugs.

But yes, beside this point, they have always been good at backwards-compatibility, a thing that Android should learn to do (but also Linux, think at when you are trying to run an old software that requires older versions of some library that is not anymore available in your package manager... sometimes all it takes is a change in version from, say 1.0 to 2.0).

I also found this part very interesting:

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows. It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client."

I have always wondered why IE sucked so bad... if really with all the devs at Microsoft they couldn't do any better than that. This explains it. It is not that Microsoft couldn't fix it, they didn't want to. They actively boycotted the development of the WEB because they knew that the WEB was going to kill the Windows API and so, in turn, make Windows irrelevant.

Some posts are very interesting, they explain why the things are the way they are, why some choices were made instead of others and so on.

Very cool, thanx!

It reminds me of P-Robots and C-Robots (around 1985), but we can look back in the years till, perhaps, RobotWar (around 1980) for Apple II which, i believe, was firstly developed on PLATO system (around 1970) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q8mKw7K9Uo http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-12/1981_12_BYTE_06-12_Computer_Games#page/n25/mode/2up

In my University we had to develop a RoboCup player (software only) as part of our Operating Systems exam ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCup ) but i remember, back when i was a teen in the MS-DOS era, that we also had computer viruses that would seek and destroy each other (i also remember that antiviruses like McAfee came with a list of all known viruses which were few hundreds back then) :D