Raymond Chen: Although 32-bit programs for Windows® 95 could use your average 32-bit compiler, and 16-bit programs could use your average 16-bit compiler, Windows 95 itself needed a special compiler, one that understood both the 32-bit and 16-bit worlds and could bridge that gap. Windows 95 also needed a custom linker that understood how to glue these two types of code together, and it needed a custom linker for VxDs (the driver format for Windows 95).
The Windows 95 team relied on the languages and tools division to provide these special-purpose compilers and linkers. I'm sure the languages division found this to be a strange request: "You want us to write a compiler that does X, Y, and Z, and it's going to be used to compile only two DLLs in its entire lifetime?" It's true. But these were, after all, two pretty important DLLs.
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