No Backwards Compatibility in the Future: Difference between revisions

 

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* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'': Spike and Jet hunt through esoteric tech shops, black markets and ancient ruins, to chase down a working Betamax, which is so scarce even avid collectors don't have hope of seeing one in their lifetime. They have a tape that supposedly holds clues to Faye's past—how far from the past she must have come from in order to have ''anything'' recorded on Beta is the biggest clue.

** When you put the number together to find out that it was recorded in {{spoiler|2010}}, you find yourself questioning where they got it from to begin with, and why they would be using it to make a video time capsule instead of any other recording medium found in modern society. Even in 1998 when the anime was made, DVDs had already become mainstream, and VHS video recorders were still commonplace to find. Betamax has been pretty much impossible to find since the early 90's.

 

 

** If it ''is'' (well-preserved!) magnetic tape, it's not too farfetched to think the tricorder could theoretically read the orientation of the particles on each tape layer rapidly, similar to how a [[wikipedia:Laser turntable|laser turntable]] can read a record without a needle (in fact, preserving vinyl records is what that's ''for'').

*** Or even badly preserved tapes. There was a case where the flight data recorder tape from a plane crash was too badly damaged by the fire to be replayed. They got the data off it by having people painstakingly examine it with microscopes, and read the ones and zeros off it, at a rate of about 1 second's worth of tape a day.

* The [[Sega]] console line of the early Nineties were known for excellent backward compatibility (especially compared to chief rival Nintendo): the [[Master System]]'s cartridges could not only be used on the [[Game Gear]] with an adapter (not surprising as the Game Gear was essentially a portable Master System) but also on the [[Mega Drive]] with a second adapter that duplicated some of the Master System's hardware (This was partly because the [[Mega Drive]] had the same Zilog Z-80 processor that was in its 8-bit siblings). Unfortunately, incompatibility set in with future Sega consoles (oddly, given that the Mega CD and [[Sega Saturn]] used the same storage medium, the CD, and the [[Dreamcast]], while using GD-ROMS, could read CDs...)

 

* Many old websites will now have dead plugins as browsers have moved on to better software than what was once used in the early days of the WWW.

** Shockwave, replaced by Flash and, in some places, Java.

*** Flash itself is slowly being replaced by newer systems, although none has been dominant enough to supplant it.

*** [[HTML 5]] standards are set to replace Flash for multimedia based applications... which is most of the reason why Flash is used. It's gaining ground, especially with big-wigs dropping Flash support.

* MMOs that rely on company-owned servers, eg for online [[Copy Protection]], are often doomed. When the company decides the game is no longer worth running, they'll pull the plug, and rarely does the server-side software get released to anyone else. You better hope enthusiasts managed to reverse-engineer the tech and make their own, or that game's gone for good.

** Same with online play in other game genres, for example, as mentioned above, Microsoft has pulled the plug on all original Xbox online gameplay.