Re: Byte ordering

On Tue, 8 Oct 2024 22:28 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

The same problem seems to have messed up all the attempts to provide
good Unix emulation on VMS.

Was it the Perl build scripts that, at some point their compatibility
tests on a *nix system, would announce “Congratulations! You’re not
running EUNICE!”.

In article <vdvvae$1k931$2@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro) wrote:
>

I think the whole _personality_ concept, along with the supposed
portability to non-x86 architectures, had just bit-rotted away by that
point.

 
Some combination of that, Microsoft confidence that "of course we can do
something better now!" - they are very prone to overconfidence - and the
terrible tendency of programmers to ignore the details of the old code.

It was the Microsoft management that did it -- the culmination of a whole
sequence of short-term, profit-oriented decisions over many years ...
decades. What may have started out as an “elegant design” finally became
unrecognizable as such.

Compare what was happening to Linux over the same time interval, where the
programmers were (largely) not beholden to managers and bean counters.