It’s also a product of the segmentation of the developer tools in Microsoft. The Windows team was responsible for the compiler rather than the Developer Tools team.

I think at least Excession has one of the protagonists transition at the end of the novel.

So unless you have a locked down device like a phone, you can’t magically port everything over to a new settings app without providing a path for your ISV / IHV ecosystem to migrate to on timelines that are sensible for the business. And ‘drivers’ consists of way more than hardware devices: database access drivers etc etc.

Part of me wonders if an AI model couldn’t just sandbox the old UI and inspect it, and then auto map to a new settings style AI.

https://github.com/dotnet/sourcelink

At my previous job they used to use Macs to control scientific instrumentation that needed a data acquisition card. Eventually most of the newer product lines moved over to Windows but one that was used in a validated FDA regulated environment stayed on the Mac. Over time supporting that got harder and harder: they managed through the PowerPC to Intel transition but eventually the Macs with PCIe slots went away. I think they looked at putting the PCIe card in a Thunderbolt enclosure. But the bigger problem is guaranteeing supply of a specific computer for a reasonable amount of time. Very difficult to do these days with Macs.

I pretty much knew all the clock cycle counts for the instructions as a teenager, and you would code assembler with them always in mind.