For some reason, I suspect it does not run on Windows 1.0 to 3.11 either. I also find it strange to think it would run on both Windows ME and Windows NT 3.5, while excluding Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows NT 3.5 and Windows ME are nearly a decade apart. The Windows subsystem’s software support in Windows NT 3.5 would be a subset of Windows 95/98.
Using Windows 2000 is like using a well-crafted Linux distro. Things just work.
I also remember 2000 as the only rock solid Windows release, and I never had to reinstall it. XP was very close to that after it fully matured, but nothing feels like 2000.
2000s kernel was one of its better features, but lack of blingy GUI was also helping in its stability IMHO.
Through the life of Windows NT 4.0's life span, MIPS and PowerPC died early, and Alpha support was axed just before the very end. In Windows 2000's development, i386 and Alpha were the only ports left, and Alpha was axed before it could make it to final release.
x86 and Alpha lived simultaneously for most of its development. It wasn't done "first" on Alpha (quite the opposite).
In hindsight, the progress Microsoft made in the ten years between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 2000 seems incredible. They transitioned from a 16-bit shell running on top of DOS to a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc.
Twenty-five years later, there has been basically no progress.
At a minimum, I would have expected something like the Knowledge Navigator
Windows NT, which was developed by people (Dave Cutler et al.) who knew how to design and build operating systems (VMS, etc.).
it is by helen custer. it talks about dave cutler's work on it, apart from other stuff.
'Windows Internals' series is the successor to Inside Windows NT.
Windows 2000 is my favorite release ever, but anecdotally, I can deny the "no crashes" claim. Sure it was rare, but I had my share of BSODs and weird behavior on it. Still much more solid than... pretty much every other release.
To be fair, I have old MacOS laptops that are my wife's laptops, we keep them around because they still turn on, and they have all her old files (I've backed it all up several different ways for her), but I never go on the web with any of the browsers installed on those systems.
I know, there pretty nice Linux distros that are lightweight and snappy too. One day... :) but not yet :)
compared to what, Linux? the BSDs? Solaris? OS/2 didn't achieve market success but it added major feature subsystems at the same brisk pace.
That exposure allowed them to see how valuable Dave Cutler's PRISM team would be in a total redesign in melding VMS and (whatever tolerable) UNIX features into a new kernel, but focusing it upon Win32.
There were OS/2 and POSIX emulation layers also, but these were obviously second class.
Windows 10 on the other hand will deal with display driver crashes just fine, falling back to safe mode.
Better list the complete list of versions where it has been tested, like "Windows XP/7/8/10/11"...
"It runs on Windows NT, version 2003/XP/Vista/7/8/10/11."
Victory!
To be honest, though, I very much doubt that anyone has fully tested either that claim or what the headlined article itself claims. A quick look at the source turns up things that require the full Windows NT security model, wide character versions of the API, and threads.
It probably does not run on any version of DOS+Windows, and "except Win95 and Win98" in the headlined article is likely a fumbled way of saying that, which didn't account for those not being the only versions of DOS+Windows that exist.
Win32s was for Windows 3.x only
Win32 for 9x/Me was originally called Win32c, but then Microsoft renamed it to just plain Win32, despite the fact that name was shared by the much more complete NT-based implementation.
It won't. I see lots of calls to CreateThread/etc in the source. Win32s didn't support threads.
Today in 2025, "It runs on all versions of Windows, except Win95 and Win98" comes across as a poetic way to say "we make an effort to support older computers running older versions of Windows."