Windows had one for DOS, Windows 16, "posix" and "os/2" with the last two in air quotes because it was only a subsection and they claimed mission accomplished - I think it was specifically to satisfy some government requirement but don't use me as a reference here. I don't think it could do os/2 "Presentation Manager" for instance.
Regardless, it didn't come free - there's people up in Redmond who had that as part (or maybe all) of their job. I would have done that - maintain an esoteric part of Windows for a Microsoft salary? That's the kind of job where you have almost no boss. Sign me up.
There was a Presentation Manager subsystem for NT that could run 16-bit OS/2 graphical programs, but it was about as hard to come by as buying a single LTSC license is today.
The lesson of DESQ is to design software to run on the computers of tomorrow and don't worry so much about the computers of today. That sounds stupid to me as well but neither of us have yachts or private jets so what do we know. It's about colonizing the future.
I wouldn't be surprised if FreeDOS could spin this up.
https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/
There's also a long running ticket in dosemu2 around some issues with DesqView/X https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606
In some more years it will probably be working fine there.
DesqView/X was graphically multi-tasking DOS programs and running X applications the year after Linux was released. This was the Windows 3.1 era ( no cooperative multitasking ) and before OS/2 2.0 was out. Amazing.
Like everything else at the time though, it could not run Windows applications ( Microsoft Office ) and so it was doomed.
Old Microsoft put lots of thought into extensibility of APIs and makes it so that the old interfaces still work when they introduce new functionality.
New Microsoft rewrites components from scratch and deprecates the old one every few years, and doesn't bother to shim over the old interface.
The former group has it such that if your app was well written circa 1997-2001, it works well on the current release.
The latter group has it so that you have several different copies of .NET on your hard drive and the "recommended" UI libraries for new applications has changed a lot, and the new hotness from a few years ago is deprecated.
This seems to be a trend across the industry, not just Microsoft. And it's a real shame. It makes it too risky to use a lot of shiny new things in real projects.
The Microsoft-specific variant of it is something I've seen up close. One of the issues always struck me as confusing interface and implementation. There isn't a good recognition of the fact that when you write against an API, you code against an abstraction, not a particular implementation. If your interface is good enough, you can do the rewrite treadmill thing to justify your current bonus or whatever, but you can point the old interface at a new implementation without most callers knowing the difference.
So, I think a good example of this working relatively well would be Windows audio. The WinMM API still works. They rewrote the audio stack a couple of times, and introduced new APIs such as WASAPI and I forget the newer one. Winmm isn't broken. It may not have access to all the latest features, but it works.
In contrast, all too often they discard an entire API because they want to rewrite the components underneath. But the I in API stands for interface. A good interface can survive rewrites of what's underneath.
Absolutely!
But a good interface is also a really difficult thing to engineer, in part because it seems like a relatively easy thing. The gotchas don't become apparent until long after you ship.
Sometimes I wonder if some of this is just cost-cutting. A difficult task is an expensive task. Other times, I wonder if it's because API design is an actual specialty, and there are too many devs doing it who don't have the chops for it.
Some interfaces that are very simple can allow a broad range of implementations but cannot not expose their capabilities. On the other hand, some interfaces that provide good control over runtime characteristics etc. already give away the implementation.
If "API" were primarily about abstraction, it would be called APA.
One point I'll offer is that ability to shim an old interface onto a new implementation validates the design of the new thing. If you can't shim them, chances are there's some necessary problem you aren't solving, and possibly aren't aware of.
Concrete details of all these things will alter the discussion. I think my example of audio is a good one for the strength of "the old way". The old interface works, even though it does vastly different things than it did in 1995. Like you say, maybe there are some features you can't get with the old interface -- that can be OK. But they didn't break it.
The Win32 subsystem on NT-based Windows began as such a shim too. The NT native APIs sometimes look very very different. Most people don't know this. eg. Most people don't know that renaming things isn't its own syscall that operates on a source filename a la unix rename(2), which is what Win9x did -- that there's transparently an NtCreateFile() call that happens inside MoveFile() ... Philosophically, the NT API "hates" doing things based on filenames, most operations that Unix or Winapi have as filenames operate on handles... But nobody needs to know, the Win9x API is the public API.
Deprecated C++/CX and .NET Native, while neither Native AOT nor C++/WinRT are proper replacements in capabilities, replaced UWP/WinUI 2.0 with WinAppSDK/WinUI 3.0 with lots of missing capabilities.
I highly encourage you to take a look at the work Microsoft did with the XBox backwards compatibility for the XBox One X/S; unlike their naming teams, MS have people who care deeply about this stuff. Not only did they spend a lot of time making sure that most games work on the One X, they spent time doing things like having the newer platform upgrade the games on the fly where possible.
MS absolutely has people tinkering with their old APIs, sometimes to quite good effect.
Really old citation, 1995...
>There was an article a couple of years ago about taking binaries from either windows 1...
The below article seems to go more indepth and was written in 2020, might even be the one you were thinking of:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/05/10/1753203
>As previously noted, Windows 95 dropped support for 1.x and 2.x binaries. The same however was not true for Windows NT, which modern versions of Windows are based upon. However, running 16-bit applications is complicated by the fact that NTVDM is not available on 64-bit installations.
>After letting NTVDM install, a second attempt shows, yes, it is possible to run Windows 1.x applications on Windows 10 [32-bit].
>FONTTEST also worked without issue, although the TrueType fonts from Windows 3.1 had disappeared.
No way. I'll need major citations on that. Wikipedia for one, firmly disagrees as does every book I've read on that history.
Windows backwards compatibility is also pretty phenomenal if you DON'T know what you're doing and are important enough.
There is the famous case about Windows 95 detecting SimCity and then switching to a more careful memory manager as SimCity had quite some use after free problems, which would crash otherwise.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
This is a point on which I give Microsoft high praise, and they have my great sympathy.
The issue for Windows is existential -- a large percentage (perhaps a majority) of people would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if they had to replace their software because of a new Windows version. Backward compatibility is Microsoft's moat.
It has been worth it to Microsoft to put serious resources toward that end, and they've worked miracles in terms of backward compatibility. It really is amazing.
And I have sympathy for them about it, too, because I guarantee that Microsoft would rather be able to run without carrying that burden too much.
I think this is the main reason why they are extremely forceful about updates. If everyone is using the same version, backward compatibility becomes easier because you don't have to keep it for as long.
And then I opened again a windows laptop...and the words than came to mind were "missing the forest for the trees".
Like, I feel that Microsoft really cares a lot about each and every tree, and went above and beyond to make the most trees happy and cut down as few trees as they could at every iteration. And we lauded then for that, cheering at every tree that could stay alive.
Except now the forest is really badly planned, it grew and expanded a lot but without enough prunning really, each user has to carve a path with a chainsaw to get anywhere livable, we regularly fall into forgotten valleys with runes to unlock lost technology.
I won't argue it needs to be a walled garden breaking new at every release, but there must be a better middle-ground for all of this.
It's hard, really hard, so I don't really blame them for failing. But, Apple mostly managed it. AppKit/UIKit is pretty much a direct path from NeXTStep in the 1980s. 30+ years of evolution, without breaking the whole API until SwiftUI came along. Pretty impressive. Apple should get more credit for that.
Just thinking about the two processor architecture transitions and the whole OS7 -> OSX switch, they really have an expertise no other company seems to even get close to.
Offering emulation where compatibility is broken definitely helps.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/#...
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/
[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/high-d...
"if you're creating a new Windows app from scratch, it is highly recommended that you create a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application. UWP applications automatically—and dynamically—scale for each display that they're running on."
but no fault on you for being confused, Microsoft announces changes in strategy so fast they can't update their docs to keep up, so their once great MSDN has become a rats nest of contradictory advice and recommendations.
At any rate if you've tried to do Win32 hidpi you will know that it hardly works and this represents defeat by Microsoft. For example hidpi is only even attempted for windows created from dialog resources, but most aren't, so if you run any classical win32 apps they still have tiny 16x16 icons everywhere, tiny fonts, basically unusable on modern screens. Apple went through this pain with the original Retina transition where icons were blurry on old apps for a while, but they updated all their own apps and brought the ecosystem with them on that journey. Microsoft never did.
And it's all like that. Win32 has barely evolved for decades. There are occasional new magic flags and an ever-greater pile of hacks, but there's been no serious attempt to keep it competitive. The assumption was that everyone would migrate to .NET and WinForms but that didn't happen for various reasons. By then, Win32 - never a particularly well designed or well loved API even inside MS - was so aged that they felt it'd be easier to start over from scratch. And once that Rubicon was crossed, they did it again and again.
There was an article a couple of years ago about taking binaries from either windows 1 or 2, changing a few bits of the header and it would run fine.
Edit: actually it's covered in the Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0x
It's an old citation but here's the snippet:
"Due to Microsoft's extensive support for backward compatibility, it is not only possible to execute Windows 1.0 binary programs on current versions of Windows to a large extent but also to recompile their source code into an equally functional "modern" application with just limited modifications"
I haven't touched windows in probably 15 years though so I can't speak for any of this. Funny, I was a Windows software developer for a decade and now I know nothing about it. I don't even know if the debug tools I used to use made the leap to 64 bit