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by hedgehog 1732 days ago
Exactly. MS rehosted win16 apps on top of a new kernel, ported the UI, and encouraged developers to migrate code to win32. Apple had pieces of a similar transition with the transition to PPC but failed to execute, maybe because they were betting on different attempts to rewrite everything from scratch.
1 comments
pjmlp 1732 days ago
Win16 and NT branch don't share almost anything.

Probably the only port was Win32s, which was a subset of Win32 backported to Win16.

Win16 stuff runned on a VM like environment, WOW.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows

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hedgehog 1732 days ago
I'll admit I haven't seen the NT source but from a user perspective NT's UI (widgets, progman, etc) looked and functioned near identically to Windows 3 so I've always thought those bits were ported over. I'm aware most everything under that was replaced. To my eye that was one step in a well-executed evolution up from legacy Windows towards the eventual convergence in XP.
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temac 1732 days ago
Yes the GUI was mostly ported from consumer Windows to NT. First the 3.1 GUI, then 95.
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