Windows 11 is the most modern, secure, and updated Windows ever—at least that’s what Microsoft keeps saying. But a senior Microsoft executive recently revealed just how much of the underlying technology in Windows 11 is still legacy, all the way from decades ago.
One such relic in Windows 11 comes into play whenever you right-click a file or launch a desktop app. When you perform such tasks, you’re executing code that was written in the 1990s.
We’re talking about the Win32 API, for which Microsoft still maintains a programming reference support document. Although the Win32 API became widespread with Windows 95, it had already been implemented in Windows NT prior to that. (See our visual tour of Windows through history!) But the surprising revelation here is that Microsoft never planned for this API to stay relevant for so long.
Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Azure and founder of Microsoft Sysinternals, explains in a video posted to social media by the Microsoft Dev Docs account:
Russinovich explains how no one expected Win32 to have such a lasting legacy and why he believes it’s still so important today:
Did anyone in the 90s expect Win32 to still be a first-class API surface in the year 2026? And I think I can safely answer, “No.” Nobody, I think, would’ve expected that because we were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026. Not Win32 that was designed back in Windows 95 days. I think one of the reasons it’s got this staying power is just a fundamental layer inside of Windows that so many apps have built on—so many technologies and ecosystems have been built on top of—that it’s kind of bedrock.
Russinovich continues:
Now, I think that there’s been various times in Microsoft’s history where we thought we’d reboot the Windows API surface, like WinRT, that actually didn’t play out the way a lot of people expected it to, given still the separation between the client, Win32, and the browser (HTML and JavaScript).
He ends the video talking about a few other tools that were written decades ago yet still live on, including Sysinternals, Sysmon, and ZoomIt. Learn more about why Sysinternals is great for Windows troubleshooting and how Sysmon is being added directly into Windows itself.
