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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

And presumably, they couldn't just ship the (still working) 32-bit executable because... politics.

From a comment on that blog:

That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."

Thanks, I didn't read the comments. The technical point is probably not the whole truth: Vista 64-bit shipped with a 32-bit Internet Explorer for plugin compatibility. So there must have been some kind of setup infrastructure.

The "besides" point is what I was expecting: there was some kind of rule not to ship 32-bit-only components to claim "full 64-bit support". A rule that was mindlessly applied even to a little game that has nothing to do with the core OS. As I said, politics.

(Not that I personally care, but I've observed that people love those builtin games.)

And I still miss the cat as the "office assistant" (it's much nicer than Clippy). Not to do anything useful, just to react there on the screen while the office work is done. Really.

To this day, IE is still typically ran in its 32bit variant due to plugins. There are probably dozens of included executables that are 32bit only.

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