5 ms·

Confusingly there was also a windows 95/nt compatibility environment released for win 3.1 -- the win32s subsystem. Many, if not most, applications written for

Confusingly there was also a windows 95/nt compatibility environment released for win 3.1 -- the win32s subsystem. Many, if not most, applications written for win95 or NT 3.x APIs could run on windows 3.1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not.

wryun 9y ago
My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows 95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released for Windows 95. I'd call it a 'Win32 API for Windows 3.1' rather than a compatibility environment for Windows 3.1.
- yuhong 9y ago
  Yea, old anti-trust exhibits mentioned so-called 32-bit Windows extenders, which had many limitations compared to say OS/2 2.0. For example, I think all Win32s apps ran in a single global address space, not to mention the lack of multi-threading etc.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  Correct. Win32s was a brief stopgap between home/low-cost user support for 32-bit APIs and the release of Windows 95.
  - stormbrew 9y ago
    While this was part of it, I think the main reason it existed was more for smaller developers who couldn't use/afford windows NT (at the time really really expensive) a win32 development environment before win95 came out so there'd be more software (of the shareware variety) for it when it came out.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Yep, i recall trying to get a game demo going that required Win32s and WinG installed. Ended up taking up so much of the old HDD that i barely could get the game going, and it crawled.
  - muro 9y ago
    Similar here - I think Battle Isle 3 was annoying being built on that api
  - lathiat 9y ago
    I remember running Win32s with a shell that emulated the look of Windows 95 on 3.11. My 486 has some kind of Boot sector overwrite prompt to protect against viruses but it displayed on screen in text over the graphical UI of the Win95 installer and that froze the machine and I couldn’t continue.
- beached_whale 9y ago
  Windows 3.11 for workgroups had the win32 subsystem
dijit 9y ago
> Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not. Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not. I, too, made this presumption about Microsoft. However in the switch from 2012 R2 to Server 2016 code that I run asserts often because it seems like the entire process tree model has changed. So maybe MS is backing off of its forward/backward compatibility strictness.

wryun 9y ago

My (possibly faulty) memory of win32s is that it was came out before Windows 95, and that it would not run most of the programs that were later released for Windows 95. I'd call it a 'Win32 API for Windows 3.1' rather than a compatibility environment for Windows 3.1.

yuhong 9y ago
Yea, old anti-trust exhibits mentioned so-called 32-bit Windows extenders, which had many limitations compared to say OS/2 2.0. For example, I think all Win32s apps ran in a single global address space, not to mention the lack of multi-threading etc.
ashleyn 9y ago
Correct. Win32s was a brief stopgap between home/low-cost user support for 32-bit APIs and the release of Windows 95.
- stormbrew 9y ago
  While this was part of it, I think the main reason it existed was more for smaller developers who couldn't use/afford windows NT (at the time really really expensive) a win32 development environment before win95 came out so there'd be more software (of the shareware variety) for it when it came out.
digi_owl 9y ago
Yep, i recall trying to get a game demo going that required Win32s and WinG installed. Ended up taking up so much of the old HDD that i barely could get the game going, and it crawled.
- muro 9y ago
  Similar here - I think Battle Isle 3 was annoying being built on that api
- lathiat 9y ago
  I remember running Win32s with a shell that emulated the look of Windows 95 on 3.11. My 486 has some kind of Boot sector overwrite prompt to protect against viruses but it displayed on screen in text over the graphical UI of the Win95 installer and that froze the machine and I couldn’t continue.
beached_whale 9y ago
Windows 3.11 for workgroups had the win32 subsystem

dijit 9y ago

> Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not. Microsoft has always been laser-focused on forwards- and backwards- compatibility, whether it makes sense to the rest of us or not. I, too, made this presumption about Microsoft. However in the switch from 2012 R2 to Server 2016 code that I run asserts often because it seems like the entire process tree model has changed. So maybe MS is backing off of its forward/backward compatibility strictness.