Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
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Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#2This article has the bones of something interesting, but the style is too barren and the content really needs to be fleshed out more. I feel like if a human had written it, they would have thought of more to write. Like a human wouldn't be content with two paragraph section about K&R C without actually writing about difficulties encountered with this, parts that were interesting to implement and parts that weren't, et cetera. A human would look at that and go "ok but, what is the point to this, what makes this interesting?"
It is not enough to simply say you have done something interesting (which is all that this blog post amounts to), we as humans want to know the story of it, it's that that makes it interesting. You can't get that story if you're just vibecoding it, much like how the one person involved in Wolfram Alpha spent a lot of tokens on an LLM that constructed alternative forms of logic, and came away from it thinking that it was worthless, the entire time wasted, because there was absolutely no way for a human to interact with it, those logics had no story or analogies or anything for a human to latch on to.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#3This article has the bones of something interesting, but the style is too barren and the content really needs to be fleshed out more. I feel like if a human had written it, they would have thought of more to write. Like a human wouldn't be content with two paragraph section about K&R C without actually writing about difficulties encountered with this, parts that were interesting to implement and parts that weren't, e…
I agree, another example is the line ‘lots of things had to be done by hand’. I think a more human narrative would be describing the discovery that thing X that we take for granted was missing and tell the story of figuring it out.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt though, perhaps they were aiming for brevity.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#4While I haven't daily driven Windows in years and am usually the first to criticize Microsoft. You have to give credit where credit is due; Windows backwards compatibility is simply nuts. I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version, nor have I heard of anyone who did.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#5While I haven't daily driven Windows in years and am usually the first to criticize Microsoft. You have to give credit where credit is due; Windows backwards compatibility is simply nuts. I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version, nor have I heard of anyone who did.
> I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version
Try running a real-mode Windows program on a modern version of Windows.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#6Winapi has exploded the last years in terms of functionality, still it was never sanitized to follow any C standard in terms of types.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#7While I haven't daily driven Windows in years and am usually the first to criticize Microsoft. You have to give credit where credit is due; Windows backwards compatibility is simply nuts. I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version, nor have I heard of anyone who did.
> I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version Try running a real-mode Windows program on a modern version of Windows.
You just need to install 86Box as a compatibility layer. Everything runs perfectly.
You only have to copy-paste one .exe file and then you can launch your app from Windows, that’s it. Sounds perfectly reasonable.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#8While I haven't daily driven Windows in years and am usually the first to criticize Microsoft. You have to give credit where credit is due; Windows backwards compatibility is simply nuts. I had never run into compatibility issues with programs or games built for older Windows version, nor have I heard of anyone who did.
Some games that ran on Vista, can run under Wine, but not on Windows 11. The backwards compatibility story has changed in the last few years.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#9The game is known as Qix, Xonix (title of a clone) is not a common name for the game.
Re: Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later
#1016-bit windows applications aren't supported natively by 64-bit windows, but OTVDM (based on Wine code) will run most of them fine.