Head

"Operating system vendors face this problem once or twice a decade: They need to migrate their user base from their old operating system to their very different new one, or they need to switch from one CPU architecture to another one, and they want to enable users to run old applications unmodified, and help developers port their applications to the new OS. Let us look at how this has been done in the last 3 decades, looking at DOS/Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Palm."

"Operating system vendors face this problem once or twice a decade: They need to migrate their user base from their old operating system to their very different new one, or they need to switch from one CPU architecture to another one, and they want to enable users to run old applications unmodified, and help developers port their applications to the new OS. Let us look at how this has been done in the last 3 decades, looking at DOS/Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Palm."

Wow, hats off to Michael Steil of pagetable.com for this thorough and informative article. I want this to be on Page 1 here on OSnews, but that means having to write something about it; and what is there to write that hasn’t already been covered in the article?

I personally have gone through a number of OS transitions, and whilst the article does cover each vendor’s personal migration path up the version numbers, we should consider another migration path that many of us do--switching from one vendor’s OS to another!

One can argue that there is no direct [vendor-supplied] migration path for this, because it’s different vendors with mostly proprietary software and file formats. Applications on the one OS are not available on the other.

In fact—if anything—vendors have made it easier to migrate version numbers, CPU architectures and bitness than to migrate to a new vendor entirely, when theoretically, the easiest movement should be sideways--just taking your data to another OS that provides transparent mechanisms for manipulating that same data.

Apple provides a "Move2Mac" product to transfer your Windows files to a Mac, and now can even do so in-store as a customer service. Microsoft don’t provide