Re: "When it's political, technology cannot do anything." @Paul Crawford
"I guess another unanswered question is how many of those 800 programs are supported for the planned Windows 10 roll out?"
Supported? Probably many of the software is already unsupported.
What won't work are all DOS programs (bet there are some), but DOSBox will run the DOS software (as it would under Linux as well). Printer port dongles may work but I recall needing some special DOSBox builds...
It's the 16-bit Windows software that requires the most work. First, Windows be 32-bit to run it. And you may need to register all the DLL/OCX files, disable UAC, change system file permissions and such. And they may still not work, requiring some phased out APIs or something... Then again the software may work out of the box - I've been playing Civilization 1 for Windows from Windows3.1 era in Windows 8 box flawlessly. (CIV1 still rules)
One show stopper is probably all the devices with no drivers since Win98 or XP or such. One of my clients had to spare several XP systems because their microscopes had a camera which didn't have drivers beyond XP.
The biggest show stopper is finding the installation media, and then hoping the disks and drives still work...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
