Comment by rramadass

Good informative article.

Win16 programming was an important formative phase in my career. There is a lot of wisdom in old solutions to thorny problems and knowing them often clues you to how one may adapt them to today's problem. For example, when CPU+GPU programming appeared i immediately imagined CPU memory accessed with "near" pointers and GPU memory accessed with "far" pointers with a switch to a pseudo-segment register.

It also conditioned a programmer to learn about various complexities involved and be careful in their programming i.e. it taught you discipline. You understood your compiler, OS and hardware better and how to write code keeping them all in mind. For example, i often say my study of embedded programming started with Win16!

Another bit of cleverness was "Thunking" between 16-bit and 32-bit code. Here is Raymond Chen on how it worked there and Why can’t you thunk between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows? - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081020-00/?p=20...