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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

To me, it's even more funny when you realize "WOW" actually means "Windows on Windows." Say what??

Makes sense to me, then again I know NT inside out...

It's NT's syscall translation layer, CPU mode switching backend and entry point front end. It was originally used to run 16-bit apps on 32-bit platforms but is now WOW64 so is to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit machines.

Basically it's a very light weight virtualisation layer.

And it works well. My circa 1996 RPN calculator I wrote in VC++ works perfectly on 2013 x64 machine.

Don't get me wrong. I know it makes sense once you know what it is. And the result in terms of compatibility and stability is impressive.

Still, when I first heard the phrase "Windows on Windows" I had a chuckle.

It reminds me that I enjoyed the way x86 apps ran on my old Alpha NT machine. If I recall correctly, the process list included "fx32" beside each.

WOW doesn't stand for Windows On Windows. WOW64 stands for Windows On Windows 64 [bit].

Oh, that I didn't fully appreciate. That actually makes it more reasonable. (Not being sarcastic!)

What are you trying to do? Make me feel bad for having a good laugh at the name when I first looked it up? :)

>Still, when I first heard the phrase "Windows on Windows" I had a chuckle.

The Windows 2000 loading screen had the tagline "Built on Windows NT Technology." They left it there through multiple SP rollouts IIRC.

I always assumed that was to placate business customers who might have (justifiably) worried that Windows 2000 was related to Windows 98, rather than descending from NT 4.

NT stands for "New Technology".

For everyone worried about Win98 relation simple "Built on Windows NT" would work.

That's really what it is. 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows are running in what is essentially an emulation layer. It's a fairly thin layer now, but remember that the original 64-bit Windows ran on Itanium. The original Itanium had an embedded (slow) x86 chip for compatibility. I'm not sure if WoW ever used it, but certainly the WoW for Itanium 2 didn't, since it was dropped for that processor.

It's an API compatibility layer to allow 16-bit Windows programs to run on 32-bit Windows -- or, more recently, 32-bit Windows programs on 64-bit Windows.

Recently Microsoft went full Keanu with Windows on ARM or WOA -- but eventually they changed that to Windows RT (which might be actually worse).

A Linux equivalent acronym would be childish.

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