Microsoft goes to great lengths to ensure that software written for a previous OS works on the next version. If businesses realise that upgrading to the latest version of Windows will cause their mission critical legacy apps to stop working then they will simply not upgrade (see: Vista).
This means that software written for Windows 3.11 can run on Vista and 7 with only minor modifications. The mechanism by which this works is called Windows on Windows (WoW), which entails 16-bit applications being hosted in a process known as the NT Virtual DOS machine (NTVDM.exe).
System calls are intercepted by NTVDM which mimics a native 16-bit OS. The running application is none the wiser that it is running in a virtual machine and goes about its business as if it's running on Windows 3.11. These system calls are presumably delegated to the host OS then re-packaged to be returned to the host application. This process - going from 16-bit to 32-bit and back - is called "thunking" and is a topic I will go into detail about in further posts.
There are several factors that make 16-bit programming a headache. First of all the tools are not meant for development at the scale that we are doing it. The 16-bit memory model limits you to around 1MB of total memory so memory allocation has to be managed very carefully. Stepping over that line will result in a crash. In future posts I will detail the extreme contortions we go through to stay under the memory limit and within the boundaries.
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