The term legacy support is often used with reference to obsolete or legacy computer hardware, whether peripherals or core components. Operating systems with "legacy support" can detect and use legacy hardware.
It is also used as a verb for what vendors do for products in legacy mode – they "support", or provide software maintenance, for older products. A "legacy" product may have some advantage over a modern product, even if not one that causes a majority of the market to favor it over the newer offering. A product is only truly "obsolete" if it has an advantage to nobody – if no person making a rational decision would choose to acquire it new.
In some cases, "legacy mode" refers more specifically to backward compatibility.
The computer mainframe era saw many applications running in legacy mode. In the modern business computing environment, n-tier, or 3-tier architectures are more difficult to place into legacy mode as they include many components making up a single system. Government regulatory changes must also be considered in a system running in legacy mode.
Virtualization technology allows for a resurgence of modern software applications entering legacy mode.
Read more about this topic: Legacy System
Famous quotes containing the words legacy and/or support:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”
—Andrew Lang (1844–1912)