Wrote a few small utilities in Win32 in the early 90s; still use them today unmodified, but most recently in WINE. I have some slightly older DOS utilities that are also quite usable.

Very nostalgic. I think UI today is too simplied, but I can't stop making kind of that, because many user are not a member of Hacker News.

If you tried this on Linux desktops you wouldn't get far

Here I was thinking it would have been Kedit…

Does visual studio still package the Spy++ exe that looks like its from the early 90's

That's a year before the first PowerPC Mac even shipped.

kudos to microsoft for enabling 40+ years of API support. Most companies are ending support after less than 10 years. some even a few years ( like those Nest thermostats getting killed )

Can you imagine the maze of a diagram that enables these old APIs to draw to the screen and render controls properly still?

> Sadly, Windows 11 can’t run 16-bit Windows programs by itself, because 64-bit Windows has no NTVDM, so we’re going to have to find something from the early NT era.

I remember a recent-ish post on here that really, I mean really, dived deep into this whole thing. It turns out that it was mostly a lack of willpower or maybe political that stopped Windows 64bit running 16 bit apps.

Somewhere in the kernel, with some obscure mechanism there is support for some kind of emulation that if implemented would allow it to run NTVDM and therefore these 16 bit apps.

The author of the post even had some kind of proof of concept of running a 16 bit DOS app directly under Windows 64 bit with this.

The details are blurry, but I believe that that had the Windows team really wanted to this emulation could have been built in and totally seamless.

I got the impression that this was actually a fairly new finding which is why I suppose no one has tried it.

Related: "Chain of Fools : Upgrading through every version of windows (HQ)" (2011), they upgrade Windows 1 through to Windows 7, and demonstrate Doom II and Monkey Island working still at the end. Would be interesting to extend it to Windows 11.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

I'm imagining a future where Microsoft's Copilot pops up in the corner, Clippy style, and gives you a message like, "Hey, I noticed you're running an app that looks like it was developed when Windows Vista was new. Want me to freshen that up for you?" Then it runs a decomp/recomp process that updates the app at the binary machine code level so that it looks and feels like a modern app without any translation layers or weird bugs. No more user complaints about Windows having an inconsistent GUI.