Examining Windows 1.0 HELLO.C - 35 Years of Backwards Compatibility

For those who've been long-time readers of SoylentNews, it's not exactly a secret that I have a personal interest in retro computing and documenting the history and evolution of the Personal Computer. About three years ago, I ran a series of articles about restoring Xenix 2.2.3c, and I'm far overdue on writing a new one. For those who do programming work of any sort, you'll also be familiar with "Hello World", the first program most, if not all, programmers write in their careers.

A sample hello world program might look like the following:

#include <stdio.h>int main() { printf("Hello world\n"); return 0;}

Recently, I was inspired to investigate the original HELLO.C for Windows 1.0, a 125 line behemoth that was talked about in hush tones. To that end, I recorded a video on YouTube that provides a look into the world of programming for Windows 1.0, and then testing the backward compatibility of Windows through to Windows 10.

For those less inclined to watch a video, my write-up of the experience is past the fold and an annotated version of the file is available on GitHub

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