Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it
windowslatest.com
windowslatest.com
The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".
The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".
Buy up one copy of every software package available at Egghead Software and have your team test it and file bugs.> On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.
Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!
This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)
The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.
I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.
It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.
It might have been this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034413
MS has always bent over backwards to retain backwards compatibility, to the extent that it's genuinely a corporate weakness: it's slowed software releases, bulked them up with patches and tweaks and special-case exceptions, and prevented the company from keeping the OSes relatively reasonably-sized by dropping obsolete features.
Linux is starting to do this now, but only because the team's hand is being forced by LLM-bot vulnerability discovery. So it's dropping loads of old drivers -- but then, the kernel is mostly drivers, hundreds of thousands of them.
Apple is more proactive: it regularly says "this is the next to last version that does [function X] and the release after next will remove that.
I've been using OS X since 10.0, after 13 years using classic MacOS. Over that time, OS X has progressively dropped:
* The Blue Box VM for running Classic apps (removed in 10.5)
* Then the PowerPC version (removed in 10.6)
* Then Rosetta for running PowerPC apps (removed in 10.7)
* Then the AppleTalk network sharing protocol connections -- printers remained (I forget when)
* Then 32-bit app support (removed in 10.15)
I'm on macOS 15, on an 11YO iMac thanks to OCLP. Soon I'll be forced onto Tahoe simply because it's the last ever x86 version. The current beta of OCLP supports this. I will wait for the final release.
It periodically warns me that the AppleShare over TCP/IP is going away too. Won't directly affect me on an Intel Mac.
* Intel support is going in macOS 27
I am willing to bet Rosetta 2 and x86 binary support will go by macOS 28 or so.
It also dropped HFS writing, leaving only R/O HFS support. That may be gone now. Not tried in a few years but circa 10.13 it could happily mount a 30YO floppy disk in a USB diskette drive.
Since 10.14 it will only boot off APFS although HSF+ R/W support is fine.
They basically had a cart populated with random-ass stuff they found in computer shops to the maximum of the USB spec supported wirh hubs. They inserted the hub and watched Windows crash until everything is fixed and worked, then they started yanking it when it was still discovering devices.
It is. Both Apple and Google will push apps off their stores that have not been updated in "a while". Even if the app works fine and is perfectly finished.
But like USB-C, at some point you should just embrace the industry standard.
Also, there's Vulkan on Metal, but there's translation overhead, and I have no idea what other issues it causes. Dolphin emulator did some research on that.
Game consoles don't do Khronos APIs for the most part, they are really only standard on GNU/Linux and Android, really.
But I did mean this as part of games not mixing with Mac. You most likely have to run any game in an emulator, and it still maybe doesn't work or is much laggier. It's not just AAA games and cringesports, it's all sorts of popular games. Both AoE2 remakes for example. BeamNG works but not well. Anything with anticheat is a no (last two examples aren't this category btw). I've used WINE like 2008-2022, at some point decided nah, even though Codeweavers have done an amazing job.
I'm sure there are games that don't work but it's a minority of new Steam releases even if you exclude pure slop.
Gamedevs already have Metal support on their engines, they don't spend time with API wars like FOSS communities.
Just like, Khronos APIs are largely irrelevant in game consoles, and Windows.
Even on the Switch that does Vulkan and GL, NVN is the main API for those that want full control over the hardware.
And as note,
https://asomobile.net/en/blog/mobile-gaming-market-in-2026-t...
I think you need an emulator to run Civ1, though. My kid was asking if we could try it and I'm like "I don't think I can find that on Steam..."
1. Run CivWin on WineVDM: WineVDM, also known as OTVDM (Old 16-bit Windows Virtual Machine), is a compatibility layer that allows users to run many legacy 16-bit Windows applications on modern 64-bit Windows systems. CivWin is the Windows re-release of Civ1, that's recommended due to its high resolution support (e.g., you can play it in HD with cool mods) and some people like the final multiplayer CivNet release too. Credit: @Blake00 on this thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/using-winevdm-to-play... https://winevdm.com/does-winevdm-work-on-windows-11/
2. DosBox (get the D-Fend Reloaded frontend/GUI, it contains DosBox): https://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.io/ https://www.dosbox.com/mown/index.php
3. VirtualBox or VMWare (virtual machines solution) to install and run a copy of Windows 95/98.
Note that Microsoft removed support for 16-bit subsystems from 64-bit editions of Windows many years ago, beginning with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
With Linux you're stuck trying to decipher the ramblings of neckbeards.
Linux forums might be obtuse but at least they'll have actual technical details about the problem. Almost without fail any "fix" they propose won't work on your system because it's for a different distro that was EoL 5 years ago but they'll at least give you something to work with.
For example, people trawling the Microsoft Q&A forum for low hanging fruit to provide advice to and build out their little home computer repair business profile.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/tags/824/windows-h...
Some of these answers are really dubious. Some of these questions are really dubious.
There is so much obscure windows crap that can be found in the old internet.
Maybe there's a tiny exception with like, Apple for Adobe. They might place a phone call between executives to warn them to avoid angering the "pros" who use those apps, but I think it's more because their users internally who also use Adobe apps would notice in the course of testing the betas, than a practice of testing many apps with the intent to ensure they work correctly.
To me what this feels like is that Microsoft's culture to this day considers it would be a breach of trust to ship an OS update that, from your perspective breaks your programs that used to work fine. Compared to the approach everywhere else today that the platform owner simply dictates How Things Will Be Now.
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...
The world should not be made more vulnerable just because someone in Idaho would be pissed because if they can't run Photoshop 2.0 anymore in a newer version of an operating system.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130226221212/http://windows95t...
Like the fiasco with Python3 and Wayland. It's so clear the developers just thought “Wow, people will just switch” not realizing how much people demand an absolute drop-in replacement and then maybe later you can think of slowly deprecating features to discourage new users from adopting them. Rust realizes this with editions. Yes, it's a big investment for them to continue to support it, but the alternative is that Python library maintainers now have to have this big investment themselves because they have to maintain like 6 different versions of the same library because Python doesn't understand the value of backwards compatibility. z/OS still supports 50s COBOL frameworks and for good reason. No one is going to rewrite that.
These developers when you talk about them really do not seem to understand that people aren't jumping to rewrite code or maintain different versions at the same time and very often even call them “lazy” for not doing it like they're not using their time for other things. Say you're a company, and you can pay a developer for his time:
1) Have him develop new features that make you more money.
2) Have him fix bugs that cost you money.
3) Have him rewrite existing code that will do nothing new, and will probably introduce new bugs again so you can later go to 2.
Which is more attractive?
You're right the "commercial" timeline of Python would have supported Python 2 forever because big paying clients demand it but I think that would have led to a worse outcome for the OSS community.
It's not “by far”, the weird part is that they broke backwards compatibility but also didn't fix some of the other issues and many of the fixes didn't need backwards compatibility to be broken and most of all, the way Python works would allow code written in multiple versions to interact and they should absolutely have allowed that and allow Python3 code to call Python2 modules.
> You're right the "commercial" timeline of Python would have supported Python 2 forever because big paying clients demand it but I think that would have led to a worse outcome for the OSS community.
The cost of switching was ridiculous and it still is. “venv” needing to exist is symptomatic of the bizarre ecosystem and developers being expected to maintain like 6 different versions of the same library at times and when they don't as user you are screwed.
With Rust, multiple editions can just compile together. Crates written in one edition can be called from code written in another edition.
Also, the optimism just highlighted how out of touch they were, that they thought people would actually just rewrite everything in 5 years is bizarre and suggests a fundamental lack of understanding to me. Same thing with Wayland and GPLv3 to me. This is so common in the FOSS world. People come with a new version and just expect that everyone will quickly switch because they consider their new version better, not realizing that A) even if others think it's better, they still won't “just switch” because that costs time and money and B), very often they don't even think it's better which they never bothered to even investigate before they got started. They just assumed that everyone will agree because the “I have no idea what Xfce is or does, sorry.” people are completely out of touch with the world to be honest and it's pretty clear they're often living in some very specific online bubble and don't understand the concerns of companies, users, and just everyone outside of their own little bubble.
I think you are pointing out the conflict that can then arise, but that I don't think is avoidable: a company has relatively short-term aim of surviving until year-end (or quarter-end) and making money. FOSS contributors are hoping to create something worthwhile by whatever value system they adhere to (elegance, public recognition etc).
“I have no idea what Xfce is or does, sorry.” and Python developers actually thinking that everyone would switch in five years isn't about motivations; it's just about a fundamental lack of understanding of what goes on outside of one's own little world of people who program for fun and love tinkering. This isn't priority but simple ignorance.
FOSS does not mean all people who maintain/contribute to it work for free. A lot of them are being paid to maintain/develop module that their company uses. Microsoft developers contribute to Linux kernel all the time
It mostly affects the people who started out as volunteers, contributed to a project they cared about and then got hired by it. They were originally people who spent enough time online to actually donate their time to that and it shows. Pretty much everything that started as a hobby project rather than a business feels like it's completely staffed by people who lost touch with the world and what people outside of their specific little online bubble do and think and how people use their computers.
It is the fundamental difference in the developer's origin/experience in FOSS projects vs commercial software. However, there is an even bigger paradigm difference underneath. Academia survives on one-off projects and FOSS is often recruits students in universities who contribute as hobby, without contracts. The usual POSIX software is all about exposing things with minimal abstractions. It makes developing and iterating on software easier on the developer.
People who work in commercial software are forced into decade-long support contracts. So they develop skills in managing long-term backwards compatibility. This comes with the abstractions and software designs with more thought into their future.
You see that in Windows components that the engineers thought about how the computer systems will evolve and allocated some slack to extend the software: https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/#case-study-min... . This kind of hindsight isn't something one can easily learn without being forced into the backwards compatibility and getting burned before or mentored. Some of the skills also means that you need to learn where to place the "narrow waist" of the API.
To illustrate the difference I'll actually compare Win32 vs X11/Wayland. Win32 is a much better abstraction and much better "narrow waist" point than X11 was. X11 was designed tightly around 80's hardware and people had to add hacks on top of hacks to actually make things like GPUs work. X11's network transparent architecture actually made implementing direct rendering harder. While Win32 already had some ideas that made into Wayland and it designed nice abstractions for allocating windows, direct rendering buffers and compositing. Win32 had baked in concepts like a window or a button or text rendering. So when the devices with HighDPI appeared or when new security boundaries needed the higher level abstractions of Win32 made it possible for Microsoft to make smaller API changes while the whole X11 started to collapse with 90s hardware and then was useless for 2010s.
I think it's just the fundamental mentality of the kind of people it recruits and it wasn't always the case either. It felt like the old Unix guard of people who worked at Bell Labs were far better adjusted. If anything, this feels more like a social thing because you just encounter these kinds of people a lot outside of programming on say Reddit or 4chan, as in people who just completely seem to miss what goes on outside of their little bubble and I do feel certain types of FOSS have a higher chance of recruiting those people because they were the people who used to first submit patches for free on github and then rose the ranks. This does not in any way occur with say people being paid by Intel to write drivers for Linux. They seem to know perfectly well what goes on with the world because they weren't recruited through those channels that are just more likely to attract, shall we call it “terminally online” people as the kids call it nowadays?
> To illustrate the difference I'll actually compare Win32 vs X11/Wayland. Win32 is a much better abstraction and much better "narrow waist" point than X11 was. X11 was designed tightly around 80's hardware and people had to add hacks on top of hacks to actually make things like GPUs work. X11's network transparent architecture actually made implementing direct rendering harder. While Win32 already had some ideas that made into Wayland and it designed nice abstractions for allocating windows, direct rendering buffers and compositing. Win32 had baked in concepts like a window or a button or text rendering. So when the devices with HighDPI appeared or when new security boundaries needed the higher level abstractions of Win32 made it possible for Microsoft to make smaller API changes while the whole X11 started to collapse with 90s hardware and then was useless for 2010s.
Even ignoring the future though. It's just the understanding of the “now”. Things like initially libinput having no way to disable mouse acceleration and the developer at first resisting it until receiving a mountain of complaints and finally relenting because “Everyone would want mouse acceleration always on, right?”. Or just in general how these people seem to completely forget that desktop usage is largely just an afterthought for Linux and the main usages are phones, servers, small devices and supercomputers. To them Linux is really just a desktop kernel and they completely don't seem to realize that desktop usage of it is really super inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.
I think you're right in that most paid developers use/develop for Linux ecosystems do for server or embedded, where they use Linux out of "laziness" since it provides a basics. Then the engineering team implements everything else GUI, webservers etc on top of it. At work I'm a firmware engineer but I can also write quite complex Linux stuff and I occasionally contribute to the Yocto recipes. You really see that Linux ecosystem is really for people who prefer to dig stuff. Dig decade-old email threads, read C source the whole time. Fix and patch weird bugs and pile workaround on top of workaround by forking things. Linux ecosystem really isn't designed to scale to be deployed into wild-west PC universe and still lives in a "here is the source; good luck!" world.
> Even ignoring the future though. It's just the understanding of the “now”. Things like initially libinput having no way to disable mouse acceleration and the developer at first resisting it until receiving a mountain of complaints and finally relenting because “Everyone would want mouse acceleration always on, right?”.
I mean it can be argued where to split and keep libinput as the lower-level library for the embedded engineers (TBH I don't know if embedded engineers really care). However, what I don't understand is: if they are going to split things in a more granular way, why not provide a higher level library for DEs where functions for acceleration etc. are provided as extras.
At the same time, I have a hunch that GNOME could be the reason (AFAIK libinput dev is employed at RedHat with other GNOME devs) and GNOME likes things "lean" i.e. featureless. One of the reasons Wayland has completely surrendered window decoration and we have to use workarounds and hacks like XDG Decoration is GNOME's insistence on offloading everything to clients and vetoing every single compromise (including XDG Decoration, but Valve pushed it AFAIR).
Again I think designing Wayland as a "allocating rectangles on CPU or GPU buffers" protocol/library is okay. But why don't we have a unified higher level "Wayhill" where ex-GNOME DEs define things like what a decorated window is [^], what happens to the crashed application, unified resizing, actual display management and unified configuration so it can be shared with the login manager. Now KDE implements one thing, wl-roots implements another (wl-roots is probably closer to my "Wayhill" idea but it kind of caters to more terminal-driven stuff, I do prefer pure GUI-driven desktops) and GNOME just opposes everything.
I see this kind of "provide the lowest level abstraction, nothing else" as a paradigm in every single component in Linux. It is really tiring both as a desktop user and as a paid developer. Since it is a socio-technic concept, rather than a purely technical, I don't really see that we'll solve it with "more FOSS". The overall mindset needs to change or we need to bootstrap a new ecosystem (which is an uphill battle).
[^]: Yes Firefox and Chrome would look wacky (basically dual decorated) since they use some lower level GNOME/GTK stuff (file dialogs, cairo rendering etc, GTK themes/libadwaita), however this kind of push could have helped browsers to be more agnostic as well.
(It did work under Wine with a few small tweaks that I can't remember)
This is a debatable position. Linux distros usually do this, but a lot of modern applications ship with all their dependencies. I'd say the former is more efficient and generally better from a user perspective and the latter is more stable and is generally better from a developer/maintainer perspective. Open source encourages the former, proprietary software encourages the latter.
Read about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858177
I've read that comment at time and saved it somewhere, then when I remembered there was something like that I searched for hours yet couldn't find it.
Clearly this can't be enforced, but I've always found it bad practice to allocate memory inside a library.
For example the WideCharToMultiByte [1] function of Win32 handles UTF-16 to UTF-8 conversion. If you pass your destination pointer as NULL, then it purely calculates the number of bytes you'll need in your buffer. Then the main program actually allocates the memory and calls it again with the populated destination pointer.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/stringap...
Now you can just ship the user your machine and software can theoretically be immortal.
You mean like Windows/386 through Windows Me? They were effectively a hypervisor for DOS VMs.