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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Something that confuses me is that this states it's running a binary compiled 30years ago. How is this not 16bit?

I'm aware of win32s, I used to run it but still it seems unlikely this is a win32 console app unless there's an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances behind this.

Or perhaps it was simply recompiled after all despite what the Twitter post states?

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9x wasn't the only Windows OS.

The path contains the phrase "ntbin". It was compiled for NT.

My guess is this is a PE format type windows application. Though I suppose you could get a NE format file to work correctly if the binary was compiled as 32 bit. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this but I think you did have the option to compile either way.

Correct, it's a PE file.

Windows NT 3.1 was released on July 27, 1993.

In fact looking into this further the only thing windows 11 lacks is the ntvdm which allows some dos api calls. If your binary is straightforward and not tied to msdos which this is it's fine. So I think the idea that this is a 32bit windows console application is completely untrue. It's also intuitively untrue when you consider the age of the app being run here.

The fact that there is no Windows 11 version with NTVDM is why this must be a Win32 console app, assuming the poster is truthful. Windows NT 3.1 came out in 1993. This being in a directory called “ntbin” gives another hint.

I see that makes sense. I feel it's also a little misleading from the original post. An exceptionally specific binary from 1993 works but the implication here is that the compatibility is more than this.

Author here. I've been running Windows since 3.0 and I copy my old tool folders with me whenever I change machines or upgrade the OS. This GZIP.EXE is the oldest EXE I have in my \ntbin tool folder that still works. The folder has 579 EXE files.

> that still works.

I think that is the point being made. This exe is cherry picked as the oldest working exe, it isn't like every 30 year old exe in that folder still works.

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