You know those clunky old dialogue boxes that get exposed if you click a few too many layers deep into the Windows 11 UI? The ones that make you think, sheesh this thing is ancient underneath? Well, a senior Microsoft executive has just confirmed that Windows 11’s antediluvian innards are indeed far more extensive than that.
In a new video posted on X (via PC World), Russinovich explains how the Win32 API remains central to the functionality of Windows 11, despite dating back to Windows 95.
Did anyone expect Win32 to still be going strong in 2026? Mark Russinovich explains why its deep roots in Windows—and the massive ecosystem built on top—have given it serious staying power. Turns out “legacy” can still mean essential.SysInternals site: pic.twitter.com/6Yd3ipX42pMay 6, 2026
“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,” Russinovich says.
If you’re wondering what Win32 is, well, it’s basically a set of pre-written functions or calls that software can make to the operating system. When an application needs to draw a window on screen, read a file, process a mouse click, render text, or respond to a keyboard press, it doesn’t need to include the literal code to do accomplish those tasks.
Instead, applications call on these pre-written Win32 functions, such as CreateWindow(), ReadFile() , GetCursorPos(). And they all date back to Windows 95.
Microsoft has actually tried to move on from Win32. With Windows 8 in particular, there was a big push to move to a new API layer known as WinRT. The Windows 8 “Metro” UI largely used the new WinRT API layer and the idea was that, eventually, this more modern shell would become the primary way people used Windows.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Windows 8 was not exactly a roaring success and Windows 10 largely retreated back to the traditional Win32 shell. Part of the problem is that applications have to be rewritten to support WinRT (which itself sort got subsumed into Universal Windows Platform for Windows 10 and then was then rebranded as Windows App SDK and WinUI 3). Simply switching Windows to WinRT would have broken all legacy apps.
So, Microsoft ran Win32 and WinRT in parallel and, to cut a long story short, there was relatively little adoption of the latter. And so here we are in 2026, no flying cars, no moon bases and pretty much every mouse click you make in Windows invokes code from the early 1990s.
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