4 stories
A pre-release NT 3.1 CD player linked on 16 November 1992 also runs, using the system's crtdll.dll. Earlier NT builds crash because they used the cdecl calling convention, where Windows 11 expects stdcall.
With the otvdm 16-bit emulator, even Windows 1.01's Reversi from 1985 launches, which the author admits feels like cheating.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
Windows 10 officially died on October 14, 2025. Then Microsoft slipped its consumer Extended Security Updates window a full year forward to October 2027, and let people find out by reading the fine print.
The thread turned the unannounced extension into the joke: 'quietly' is now the giveaway word for AI-written headlines. Underneath the jokes, a sharper read — Microsoft is buying time during a RAM and SSD price spike that makes 'just buy a new PC' a hard sell.
Windows 95 nailed it: a clean dialog that let you pick an installed program inline. That same flow survived through 98, ME, and 2000.
Windows XP added an online lookup that mailed your file extension to a Microsoft web service, now defunct. Windows 10 and 11 flattened everything into low-contrast boxes that surface a Store search first.
The thread fills in the gap the author skipped, and finds a working path he missed.
By the article's own figures the modern player idles at ~377MB against ~103MB for the old one. The codecs it locks behind a fee, like HEVC, have been paid add-ons since the Windows 10 era.
The detail that stung an ex-Microsoft engineer: it's a native app with no web version that Microsoft still chose to build in HTML and JS.
