"Yup. It was an absolute scandal that Solaris binaries wouldn't run on HPUX."
No, it's an absolute scandal you could not run the same binaries on different releases of the same distro of Linux... because breaking changes in libraries didn't allow that.
Or 64-bit only distro you couldn't run 32 bit applications on unless you reconfigured them explicitly.
"Wasn't part of WIndows' problem that sometimes they had backwards bug compatibility"
I guess you are referring to old DOS applications like Flight Simulator - anyway Windows has a lot of specific support for allowing old applications to run. Read Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog to discover how far Microsoft went to ensure backward compatibility with bad written applications because some "500 Fortune" company relied on them and MS had to support them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
