What Win32 Platforms are there?
Although Win32 is a single programming “interface”, there are multiple implementations of this interface, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The most widespread platform is the Windows95 family , currently consisting of WIn95 Gold, Win95 OSR1, Win98 and win98SE. The standard name for this lot is , “Win9x” or “Windows 9x”. The Win9x implementation of Win32 is the most common one found in households and laptops. Because it has evolved from DOS and Win31, its legacy application and hardware support the best, but the overall performance and functionality is hampered by the all the legacy code it both contains and supports. Each update to the base Win95 gold edition added more features, but makes it easy to ship code which you think runs on Win95, but only works on a later edition. Test thoroughly to avoid this. Windows NT is the heavyweight implementation of Win32, offering much more functionality. Because of its heavy system requirements (realistically a P5/133 and 32+MB RAM),
