That's because somewhere deep inside every x64/x86 compatible processor is an 8086 from 1980. The architecture has more or less remained the same for 40 years with more and more shit piled on top.
You can literally still natively boot DOS from a floppy on a modern PC if you can get it to recognize and boot from a USB floppy drive and it has legacy boot enabled. You wont get very far without drivers for anything, but you'll get to the command prompt.
More than that tho, windows aims to preserve library compatibility with older software.
It's common for older games for Mac on the same architecture to break or become uninstallable on newer OS versions.
Edit: Fun rabbit hole time! Windows XP had a specific patch to allow Legoland to play with improper coding that was only removed in Windows 10 https://youtu.be/MToTEqoVv3I
Well yes but actually no, you need the 2+ hours of looking up graphics errors and crashes to get it somewhat working first.
also the reason you can still find a dialogue window from like Win95 lol, people often whine how Windows doesn't look as pretty as MacOS, but I think that's just the price for crazy backwards compatibility.
if they remove those old elements, I'd bet people are gonna rage about how their old games or software no longer work.
Mac has gone from PowerPC to Intel to ARM CPU's. They've changed architecture entirely multiple times. That's a pretty significant factor to their problem with backwards compatibility. Most of the old software on its own just isn't compatible with the newer hardware.
Windows, on the other hand, has been on consumer x86 hardware (and others) for nearly 40 years.
Yeah it sure can install these programs but thei'll either run like dogshit or not at all.
Maybe so, but all that spaghetti code to ensure the backwards compatibility comes at a cost of endless Windows jank.
I use both Windows and Mac machines for my audio work and while everything is consistently just 'plug and play' on my Mac, on the PC side I'm constantly fighting a losing battle with Windows ASIO audio driver issues, multi-monitor issues, Microsoft constantly asking me to make an account every 3 days...
For gaming, I love Windows. Still yet to find anything it does better and with less fuss than MacOS in a work environment though.
Linux, can you install this 70 year old program? It's already running, bro
I hear a lot about Windows backwards compatibilyty, but i don't think it has ever actualy worked for me. Every time i tried to install a program meant for anything older then win7/win10 i get some cryptic error and end up using a VM.
Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it's that old).
EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL
true lmao
Cries in Ubuntu