Bob Browning's blog

This week at the bridge club we had a minor crisis. We have a system for collecting scores each round and feeding them into a computer, which then produces the rankings. This week it lost both — the scores and, more importantly, the rankings. I say “more importantly” because we came top. Others may be less exercised about this.

As the club techie, it fell to me to sort it out. The results collection system works like this: small gadgets sit on each table for entering scores, these communicate wirelessly with a dedicated server, which is linked to a PC. A program talks to the server and creates a results file on the PC. So that file was the obvious first port of call.

I was in luck — the file was in Microsoft Access database format. Simple enough: load up Access, open the file. Except Access got quite shirty. It refused to open a database created with an older version of itself. So those Access databases you’ve been archiving for posterity: it turns out posterity can’t read them.

Which brings me to the real subject of this post: backward compatibility — or rather, the quiet death of it.

Modern software development has largely abandoned the idea that new versions should be able to read old data. Coding frameworks now demand that you specify exact version numbers in your configuration files. You can say “use the latest version,” but this is unwise, because new versions frequently break things that used to work perfectly. I’m looking at you, Bootstrap.

As it happened, I tracked down a utility that can read older Access database formats — with a little help from Claude — and was able to diagnose the actual problem.

In my experience, 90% of computer problems are one of three things:

1. Fixed by turning the computer off and back on again
2. Finger trouble — pressing the wrong button
3. A dodgy cable

Sure enough, it was number two.

But backward compatibility isn’t just a technical problem — it’s a human one too. New versions of familiar software can be bewildering to long-time users. There is, however, one honourable exception. The first commercial spreadsheet, VisiCalc (1979), used a “/” prefix to trigger commands — save, exit, and so on. Open Excel today, press “/” and it highlights the ribbon menu. Forty-five years of backward compatibility, hiding in plain sight.

It’s not just technology, either. Why do supermarkets rearrange everything so you can’t find the tahini?