![]() Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. I believe this is the story OP mentioned. EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :)
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