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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Look at Microsoft Windows. You can still run Access '97 because all the DLLs with the GUI widgets from Win '95 are still there. Until 2012 or so, Microsoft would regularly come out with a whole new widget set every few years. You can see this most notably in the settings UI for Windows where there are some screens in the "modern" UI and plenty of dialogs that still come from the '95/NT 4 era.

Since then Microsoft has had no real answer for "how do I write desktop applications for Windows?" other than "use Electron".

(If they were still introducing new widget sets they'd be converting the 'modern' dialogs to something 'postmodern' while still having Win '95 dialogs in there)

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I decided to verify this and came up short. I went through the installation procedure which did work but required changing some workgroup settings and running the application as administrator... not ideal but understandable. However, when I tried to run it, no good. I get an error about missing files. I then went through the process of finding some of these missing files and installing them but ultimately ran up against the final fatal error that will not allow me to proceed.

Access 97 depends on some Internet Explorer components and Microsoft has made it all but impossible to install Internet Explorer on the most recent Windows 10 and Window 11.

Apart from that I also tried getting Minesweeper and SkiFree to work on Windows 10 and Windows 10 just straight up refuses to run them with the message "This app can't run on your PC."

I installed Office ‘97 for work I think two summers ago. We had an old access database that I had to import into a new postgres-based system and it installed just fine on Windows 10. It was hilarious that clippy still tries to take over the desktop but it looks a little funny because borderless windows don’t work quite the same as they used to.

Yes that makes sense. Microsoft entirely eliminated Internet Explorer on February 14th, 2023 and with it any software that has any dependency on it will fail to work:

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/13/reminder-internet-explorer...

> Since then Microsoft has had no real answer for "how do I write desktop applications for Windows?" other than "use Electron".

Microsoft has been pushing WinUI the past few years, with WinUI 3 being the latest recommended UI toolkit [1]. I think what's interesting about WinUI 3 is it's not built into Windows - you have to ship the whole toolkit with your app, just as you would GTK or Qt on Windows. I find that a perplexing direction for a "native" toolkit.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/

You can run Access '97 on Linux under WINE. I'm not sure you can install it on current Microsoft Windows, even if it would hypothetically run.

None of my games from 15 years ago work.

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