Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least...
by mook on Friday February 16, 2024 @08:18PM
(#39405309)
At least you can still do this with third-party software like https://github.com/otya128/winevdm I guess? I imagine Microsoft doesn't see the returns for it to develop something they'll have to support for decades more…
I would personally make use of this, I know of a 16-bit program whose latest version was released in the late XP days, so it's not even that old. The idea there was that it was always compatible with DOS, some users might presumably still want to run it on DOS, and there's no point in breaking that compatibility if modern Windows can run it just fine. Then development stopped, 64 bit systems got more popular, and a recompiled version was never released.
I guess the lesson there is that if you're keeping an API for backwards compatibility, some programmers will refuse to switch to a replacement to make their software work on older systems, making the API impossible to remove down the line without breaking modern programs.