This didn’t happen by accident, as an old blog post by a former Microsoft programmer explains.
Microsoft’s solution, he says, was making sure old software worked - including SimCity.
Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly.
It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere.
“Heres the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasnt working in testing.
Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity.
Thats the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.”
