Recent Questions - Retrocomputing Stack Exchange · Jun 1, 2026

What "Appendix E" of Windows 3.1 documentation described running 32-bit applications?

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In his 2020 article on LabVIEW history in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages , LabVIEW's lead developer Jeff Kodosky writes ( PDF page 28 ): Shortly after we released LabVIEW 2, Microsoft released Windows 3.1, which was still just a 16-bit OS but it could run on a 32-bit capable 386 processor. Appendix E of their documentation described a mechanism by which a 32-bit application…

In his 2020 article on LabVIEW history in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, LabVIEW's lead developer Jeff Kodosky writes (PDF page 28):

Shortly after we released LabVIEW 2, Microsoft released Windows 3.1, which was still just a 16-bit OS but it could run on a 32-bit capable 386 processor. Appendix E of their documentation described a mechanism by which a 32-bit application could run under 16-bit Windows

What was this "Appendix E"? I wasn't aware that Windows 3.x supported 32-bit GUI applications (as opposed to 32-bit VxD device drivers, or 32-bit DOS apps using DPMI) until Win32s – which received its first production release in July 1993, although a beta version had been released in October 1992; by contrast, the first LabVIEW release to support Windows was released in August 1992. Was there some more limited support for 32-bit apps prior to Win32s?

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