Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 424 posts

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#61

Post by bastardoperator »

binkHN wrote: post #60
bastardoperator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I would say backwards compatibility at this point hinders development and it shows in windows when you're looking at 5 different UI's. I have a 4k monitor, and the installers all look blurry because they can't scale up. We can't even get decent looking icons that were created in the last decade. Honestly, I think a barebones, absolute minimist windows OS would be something that interest a lot of technical use…

> ...absolute minimist windows OS... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-and-w...

  "it allows only apps from Microsoft Store"
That's a showstopper... but cool, ty for sharing

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#62

Post by hx8 »

TkTech wrote: post #19

A fun side-effect of the "general" stability of Windows APIs is that Win32/DX has become a very stable and reliable "universal" API for Linux (and other OSes) via the massive amount of work put into Wine/Proton. I keep seeing games drop their Linux-native releases in favor of just shipping for proton.

The Proton-aware releases often are easier to setup and run better than the Linux-native releases.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#65

Post by mikkohypponen »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #40
touseol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that there is no Windows 11 version with NTVDM is why this must be a Win32 console app, assuming the poster is truthful. Windows NT 3.1 came out in 1993. This being in a directory called “ntbin” gives another hint.

I see that makes sense. I feel it's also a little misleading from the original post. An exceptionally specific binary from 1993 works but the implication here is that the compatibility is more than this.

Author here. I've been running Windows since 3.0 and I copy my old tool folders with me whenever I change machines or upgrade the OS. This GZIP.EXE is the oldest EXE I have in my \ntbin tool folder that still works. The folder has 579 EXE files.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#66

Post by Dwedit »

sumtechguy wrote: post #44
touseol wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a DOS app, it’s a Win32 console app. DOS apps (16-bit or 32-bit) or Win16 apps would not run natively.

That depends on if they are using 64 bit or not. The 16bit VDM was deprecated on that move from 32 to 64. Which is the majority of most installs these days. What is kind of neat is every windows application/dll is a valid DOS application. The first part of all of them is a valid MZ DOS 16 EXEcutable. Windows just treats it as a skippable header and reads the real header that is about 100 bytes in and then decides whi…

OTVDM will allow running 16-bit windows programs on modern 64-bit windows.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#67

Post by mikkohypponen »

sumtechguy wrote: post #52
asveikau wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9x wasn't the only Windows OS. The path contains the phrase "ntbin". It was compiled for NT.

My guess is this is a PE format type windows application. Though I suppose you could get a NE format file to work correctly if the binary was compiled as 32 bit. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this but I think you did have the option to compile either way.

Correct, it's a PE file.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#68

Post by Dwedit »

ls612 wrote: post #4

I wish there was a backwards compatibility option to give applications a “virtual display” which runs in a window, for old programs which only know how to run fullscreen at 1024x768.

I once made a program (Intended for Games only, doesn't support standard windows controls) that allows you to stretch an otherwise fixed-size window. Uses D3D9 and Pixel Shaders to draw the upscaled window.

https://github.com/Dwedit/GameStretcher

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#69

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jmkni wrote: post #63

What I find so frustrating is that Windows, under the hood, is so solid. It's just the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap, like they've ruined a solid OS with crappy surface level stuff.

It's as if, it's a product made by a giant corporation with over a dozen different teams of skilled people, with different managers and different visons on how their own team's work should impact the final product for their own career advancement purposes.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#70

Post by pdpi »

Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is definitely one of the strengths of the Windows platform. On the flipside, it's also at the root at the insanity that is the forbidden word list in MS Teams channel names.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/limits-spec...

Post reply on HN