> They may have been referring to the fact that 64-bit runs in 65-but only, no choice to drop into/out of 16-bit, etc Even in 64 bit mode it is possible to dro

> They may have been referring to the fact that 64-bit runs in 65-but only, no choice to drop into/out of 16-bit, etc Even in 64 bit mode it is possible to drop into 16 bit (protected) mode (code) if one wants to. What does not work is dropping into Virtual 8086 mode. GNU/Linux never supported 16 bit code. For Windows it would be possible in principle (and it even would IMHO sense to support this feature on 64 bit versions of Windows). On > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14246521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14246521 I wrote something about this topic. TLDR: 64 bit Windows uses 32 bit handles, which will cause problems with 16 bit applications. But there are also people on HN who stated the opinion that while this makes implementing support for 16 bit applications on 64 bit Windows harder for Microsoft, it would have been far from impossible, thus this technical reason is a mere convenient pretense not to implement this feature.