aard

aard, 1 year ago

Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.

There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.

aard, 1 year ago

There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.

(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)

At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.

aard, 1 year ago

Windows NT 3.5 and later NT 4 had C2 security certifications - assuming the system was not connected to a network, and didn’t have floppy drives (this was before USB was a thing).