In the timeframes this post is talking about, you can practically do the same in any operating system. What "basic runtime" could such an aged Linux binary use, other than glibc and Xlib/motif, which are precisely the ones which have been actually trying to preserve ABI? These 30 year old binaries have a higher change of working than week old ones...

This is similar to the fact that Office 95 will work on recent Windows, but Office 2k won't.