Comment by karamanolev
3 years ago
According to Wikipedia, "Win32 is the 32-bit application programming interface (API) for versions of Windows from 95 onwards.".
Also from there "The initial design and planning of Windows 95 can be traced back to around March 1992" and it was released in '95. So arguably, the design decisions are closer to 30 years old than 20 :)
The main structure is from win16, although adding support for paging and process isolation was a pretty big improvement in win32. IMO its held up extremely well considering its 40 years old.