Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (WAS Re: [PATCH-RFC] 4 of 4 - New problem logging macros, SCSI RAIDdevice)

On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 09:56:42AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> And that "old_stat()" thing really ought to go some day.. It's not much of
> a support burden, and yeah, we can point people to "that old a.out binary
> from 1993 still works fine", so I guess we'll keep it another ten years,
> but at this point that has less to do with technical judgement than with
> sentimentality, I think ;^)
> 
> But yeah, I think on the whole we've done pretty well on being binary 
> compatible.

My wife still uses Applix, which I purchased when Red Hat first
started selling it.  The kernel runs it just fine.  Interestingly
enough, Red Hat no longer ships the shared libs that it uses,
but installing the necessary rpms from Red Hat 6.0 makes it work.
I looked at the dates on the binaries and they are from 1996,
but I am pretty sure they are substantially older than that.
I do appreciate you putting effort into binary compatability.
My wife would be quite upset with me if Applix quit working :-)

Jim