7 ms·

Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try

244 points by nikbackm 8y ago

doppp 8y ago
Odd, posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304
- beefhash 8y ago
  HN is notoriously fickle. The same story can get 0 upvotes, then be submitted by someone else in a couple hours and then garner hundreds of points.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    Anecdata: HN seems to prefer different content depending on the time of day - I tend to see more programming and software-related stuff in the late evening (PST), news in the morning/early afternoon, and general "interesting stuff" (e.g. Atlas Obscura) in the early evening. Of course, this may well be confirmation bias, coincidence, or a matter of my browsing habits. It would be interesting to see an actual analysis of content discipline as a function of time.
    - close04 8y ago
      It's a matter of who's available to upvote at specific times, and whether the topic makes for a nice read at those times. Sometimes a deeply technical topic or a very lengthy article aren't the best fit for the mood :). Other times they are.
  - gkya 8y ago
    How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote. I'm generally fine with it, except when it has 1-5 votes and will never see the front page. HN has so many secret behaviour that it became boring by now. I don't think I will bother posting a story again, because it's very hard to get some discussion to happen around a post (which is the whole point of posting a link for me), whereas in most Reddit subs, even if your post is in the -1 to 1 votes range, you can still get useful answers or interesting comments.
    - rubyn00bie 8y ago
      It used to be you could add something trivial to the URL like a trailing slash or some non-existent params et voila! New submission.
    - beefhash 8y ago
      > How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote. It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout. As for submissions, I'd recommend trying to land in the American morning/early European afternoon. That's when most people seem to browse and thus you have a better chance of getting upvoted to the front page. You may also be interested in this: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
      - gkya 8y ago
        I'm in Turkey which is UTC+3, and I usually submit (well I don't usually submit, but) around noon or evening, which happen to be the moments when I usually check my feeds and my mail for newsletters. Strategical submitting seems too much to me, as if I was doing it for the karma points rather than the discussion. > It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout. Yeah, yet another enigmatic "natural phenomenon" of HN. I appreciate the link you've given, but my actual point was that this sort of unknowable phenomena discourages participation. For example some time ago the [vouch] links disappeared for me. Some more time ago edits became impossible (2h is too short of a time, say I write something silly, 5h later I check back, and want to append an apology or a clarification; that's impossible, I need to reply to myself and hope people see that before scalding me). Also can not downvote after a day. What if I came across some misinformation that was older? Detaching threads is awful, because your words are removed from context; why not delete instead? Green usernames are an awful idea, most often I don't care about the poster, and why mark people because their accounts are new? Nobody needs that information. These sort of things prove to me that HN is not a "community", but more of an "order". We don't get to decide anything.
ThJ 8y ago
How do you flag something as a dupe?
- tjoff 8y ago
  It is not a dupe if it hasn't gotten tracktion before. Guidlines: If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
- zhte415 8y ago
  Hadn't seen this article before. Enjoyed it. Good link and source for further reading.
- merricksb 8y ago
  Just flag it, and make a comment pointing to the previous thread so other users and moderators can find it easily. If there's no previous thread (i.e., a submission of that item in the past 12 months with a significant number of votes and of on-topic comments), it's not a dupe :)
feb 8y ago
The previous posts of this serie have been discussed on HN: * Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926)
- megaman22 8y ago
  There are a few blogs that HN should just scrape their RSS feeds and put on the front page, and this is one of that few
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    You weren't joking. Just skimmed through the rest of the blog and this is an absolute treasure! Good place to start for others: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
- Noumenon72 8y ago
  Thanks a lot. From how in depth these are, I assumed your links went back for a year, instead of starting just 24 days ago! (Why isn't there markdown to do unordered lists on HN?)
  - ams6110 8y ago
    > Why isn't there markdown to do unordered lists on HN? You can just leave a blank line between each list item. * Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926)
21 8y ago
There is literally not a single comment addressing the content here at this moment :) Yes, I'm not helping
- 1996 8y ago
  I read that yesterday and I found it interesting as an history lesson and for the strategic insights, but I can't say I'm familiar with any of that. I didn't even know than windows before 3.1 was really used, and not just test versions
josteink 8y ago
I never liked the PS/1 and PS/2 things IBM did. It seemed like an obvious attempt to try to snare customers into a closed system. I never knew however that IBM tried to snare in Microsoft too. An interesting read for sure.
- ajross 8y ago
  Just the PS/2. The PS/1 arrived several years later and was an attempt by IBM to reclaim some of the ground lost to the emerging "PC clone" architecture. It was an ISA bus machine with IDE drives -- the opposite of the proprietary MCA stuff going on in the PS/2's of the era (which by this point was largely regarded as a business failure).
niftich 8y ago
Excel installing a captive Windows, a technical detail they could have hid, was instead played up to demo the windowing GUI, in a better implementation of shareware than nearly anything that came after. This ingenious decision really ought to be more widely known and celebrated, but seems to have fallen out of the abbreviated narrative around Windows' (or Excel's) history, and it takes specialized sources like this one, or books by Excel gurus [1] to talk more about this fact. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8 https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA...
- flomo 8y ago
  You could probably find this info in the trade press like InfoWorld, but yes, Microsoft was essentially giving-away Windows to get it catch on. 3rd party ISVs also used "runtime Windows", and you could get a full copy free with a MS mouse, or Visual Basic, or etcetera. You could also give copies to all your friends and coworkers, there was no copy-protection, and the software police didn't mind. Didn't really catch on until Windows 3 however.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in XP because the BSA threatened to throw them out. Frankly MS has held that it is better, for them, that the public pirate MS software than switch to alternatives. Also, private usage of MS software is seem by them as a sales pitch towards businesses. It allows MS to argue that potential employees already knows basic operations, so there is less required training for new hires.
    - mwcampbell 8y ago
      > I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in XP because the BSA threatened to throw them out. I don't buy it. Microsoft was so huge that I don't see why they would care about the BSA. It seems more likely that product activation really has helped Microsoft make more money.
js2 8y ago
Two thoughts. 1. I can't get over how primitive the Windows UI was compared to Mac years after Mac shipped. Apple began the Macintosh project in late '79 and by Jan '84 shipped both the Mac and the OS. Microsoft began Windows development in '81 and didn't really catch up UI-wise till Windows 3 in 1990. Meanwhile, Apple would squander its head start, not shipping an OS as technically sound as NT (1993) till OS X in 2000. 2. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost kills Microsoft going all in on OS/2. Was Microsoft successful in spite of him?
- bad_user 8y ago
  From all the available recollections, Ballmer never had any valuable foresight. I wonder why the board of directors left him as CEO after Gates’ retirement. Also reportedly Ballmer was disagreeing with Gates about how important the market of smartphones and tablets is, with Gates wanting to invest heavily in it. Oops!
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Microsoft made a ton of money with Ballmer as CEO. I imagine the board was pretty happy with him at least for most of that time.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      How much of that revenue can be attributed to Balmer though? As an outsider it seems to me that all Microsoft did during Ballmer was to milk the cash cows created during Bill Gates and at the same time destroy the good will of developers and the morale of their employees. I’m assuming any big company acquires a certain inertia and will keep producing money for as long as there is demand and the supply can meet it. Just look at Apple. So what did Ballmer do that can be praised?
      - flomo 8y ago
        I won't defend Ballmer, but the guy was a salesman, a really good salesman. Not a technologist. Also Bill Gates was "chief software architect" during the Longhorn/Vista thing so he's hardly absolved of blame.
tangue 8y ago
Ballmer could have sink Microsoft in 1986. Didn’t knew that but makes sense. How many long term bids are we missing in 2018 because Ballmer-like executives are now in power ?
nikodunk 8y ago
I love how un-apologetically "skeumorphic" this blog is. Ah, I miss the days...
- blackrock 8y ago
  I miss that skeumorphic design. I can't wait until this flat fad goes away. It's like somebody hit the computer UI design world with a stupid stick. And all the designers woke up without the ability to see in 3 dimensions, and lived a life as Flatlanders. Gestures are fantastic though.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  The best part is the loose threads. Taking the good with the bad from the real world.
skookumchuck 8y ago
At the time, Lotus was faced with a choice on where to go with Lotus 1-2-3: OS/2, Windows, or text mode. They backed the wrong horse. They were a big company at the time, could have easily bet on all three, and stayed in business.
dfox 8y ago
I assume that some variant of "bundled Windows Runtime" is the reason why trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first PC had MZ stubs, that didn't print "This program requires Microsoft Windows", but EXEC'd something like "%COMSPEC% /C WIN.COM PROGRAM.EXE"
keypusher 8y ago
As the years go by, and new stories like this come out, I find increasingly growing respect for Bill Gates.
kristianp 8y ago
Interesting that Excel was developed first for the Mac. Excel also used p-code [1][2] for its cross-platform abilities: "had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh’s 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs." It would be interesting to see the first version of excel on Mac, the windows version in the article looks very familiar. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060

244 points by nikbackm 8y ago

doppp 8y ago

Odd, posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304

beefhash 8y ago
HN is notoriously fickle. The same story can get 0 upvotes, then be submitted by someone else in a couple hours and then garner hundreds of points.
- larkeith 8y ago
  Anecdata: HN seems to prefer different content depending on the time of day - I tend to see more programming and software-related stuff in the late evening (PST), news in the morning/early afternoon, and general "interesting stuff" (e.g. Atlas Obscura) in the early evening. Of course, this may well be confirmation bias, coincidence, or a matter of my browsing habits. It would be interesting to see an actual analysis of content discipline as a function of time.
  - close04 8y ago
    It's a matter of who's available to upvote at specific times, and whether the topic makes for a nice read at those times. Sometimes a deeply technical topic or a very lengthy article aren't the best fit for the mood :). Other times they are.
- gkya 8y ago
  How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote. I'm generally fine with it, except when it has 1-5 votes and will never see the front page. HN has so many secret behaviour that it became boring by now. I don't think I will bother posting a story again, because it's very hard to get some discussion to happen around a post (which is the whole point of posting a link for me), whereas in most Reddit subs, even if your post is in the -1 to 1 votes range, you can still get useful answers or interesting comments.
  - rubyn00bie 8y ago
    It used to be you could add something trivial to the URL like a trailing slash or some non-existent params et voila! New submission.
  - beefhash 8y ago
    > How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it automatically becomes an upvote. It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout. As for submissions, I'd recommend trying to land in the American morning/early European afternoon. That's when most people seem to browse and thus you have a better chance of getting upvoted to the front page. You may also be interested in this: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
    - gkya 8y ago
      I'm in Turkey which is UTC+3, and I usually submit (well I don't usually submit, but) around noon or evening, which happen to be the moments when I usually check my feeds and my mail for newsletters. Strategical submitting seems too much to me, as if I was doing it for the karma points rather than the discussion. > It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout. Yeah, yet another enigmatic "natural phenomenon" of HN. I appreciate the link you've given, but my actual point was that this sort of unknowable phenomena discourages participation. For example some time ago the [vouch] links disappeared for me. Some more time ago edits became impossible (2h is too short of a time, say I write something silly, 5h later I check back, and want to append an apology or a clarification; that's impossible, I need to reply to myself and hope people see that before scalding me). Also can not downvote after a day. What if I came across some misinformation that was older? Detaching threads is awful, because your words are removed from context; why not delete instead? Green usernames are an awful idea, most often I don't care about the poster, and why mark people because their accounts are new? Nobody needs that information. These sort of things prove to me that HN is not a "community", but more of an "order". We don't get to decide anything.

ThJ 8y ago

How do you flag something as a dupe?

tjoff 8y ago
It is not a dupe if it hasn't gotten tracktion before. Guidlines: If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
zhte415 8y ago
Hadn't seen this article before. Enjoyed it. Good link and source for further reading.
merricksb 8y ago
Just flag it, and make a comment pointing to the previous thread so other users and moderators can find it easily. If there's no previous thread (i.e., a submission of that item in the past 12 months with a significant number of votes and of on-topic comments), it's not a dupe :)

feb 8y ago

The previous posts of this serie have been discussed on HN: * Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926)

megaman22 8y ago
There are a few blogs that HN should just scrape their RSS feeds and put on the front page, and this is one of that few
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  You weren't joking. Just skimmed through the rest of the blog and this is an absolute treasure! Good place to start for others: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
Noumenon72 8y ago
Thanks a lot. From how in depth these are, I assumed your links went back for a year, instead of starting just 24 days ago! (Why isn't there markdown to do unordered lists on HN?)
- ams6110 8y ago
  > Why isn't there markdown to do unordered lists on HN? You can just leave a blank line between each list item. * Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926)

21 8y ago

There is literally not a single comment addressing the content here at this moment :) Yes, I'm not helping

1996 8y ago
I read that yesterday and I found it interesting as an history lesson and for the strategic insights, but I can't say I'm familiar with any of that. I didn't even know than windows before 3.1 was really used, and not just test versions

josteink 8y ago

I never liked the PS/1 and PS/2 things IBM did. It seemed like an obvious attempt to try to snare customers into a closed system. I never knew however that IBM tried to snare in Microsoft too. An interesting read for sure.

ajross 8y ago
Just the PS/2. The PS/1 arrived several years later and was an attempt by IBM to reclaim some of the ground lost to the emerging "PC clone" architecture. It was an ISA bus machine with IDE drives -- the opposite of the proprietary MCA stuff going on in the PS/2's of the era (which by this point was largely regarded as a business failure).

niftich 8y ago

Excel installing a captive Windows, a technical detail they could have hid, was instead played up to demo the windowing GUI, in a better implementation of shareware than nearly anything that came after. This ingenious decision really ought to be more widely known and celebrated, but seems to have fallen out of the abbreviated narrative around Windows' (or Excel's) history, and it takes specialized sources like this one, or books by Excel gurus [1] to talk more about this fact. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8 https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA...

flomo 8y ago
You could probably find this info in the trade press like InfoWorld, but yes, Microsoft was essentially giving-away Windows to get it catch on. 3rd party ISVs also used "runtime Windows", and you could get a full copy free with a MS mouse, or Visual Basic, or etcetera. You could also give copies to all your friends and coworkers, there was no copy-protection, and the software police didn't mind. Didn't really catch on until Windows 3 however.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in XP because the BSA threatened to throw them out. Frankly MS has held that it is better, for them, that the public pirate MS software than switch to alternatives. Also, private usage of MS software is seem by them as a sales pitch towards businesses. It allows MS to argue that potential employees already knows basic operations, so there is less required training for new hires.
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    > I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in XP because the BSA threatened to throw them out. I don't buy it. Microsoft was so huge that I don't see why they would care about the BSA. It seems more likely that product activation really has helped Microsoft make more money.

js2 8y ago

Two thoughts. 1. I can't get over how primitive the Windows UI was compared to Mac years after Mac shipped. Apple began the Macintosh project in late '79 and by Jan '84 shipped both the Mac and the OS. Microsoft began Windows development in '81 and didn't really catch up UI-wise till Windows 3 in 1990. Meanwhile, Apple would squander its head start, not shipping an OS as technically sound as NT (1993) till OS X in 2000. 2. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost kills Microsoft going all in on OS/2. Was Microsoft successful in spite of him?

bad_user 8y ago
From all the available recollections, Ballmer never had any valuable foresight. I wonder why the board of directors left him as CEO after Gates’ retirement. Also reportedly Ballmer was disagreeing with Gates about how important the market of smartphones and tablets is, with Gates wanting to invest heavily in it. Oops!
- ams6110 8y ago
  Microsoft made a ton of money with Ballmer as CEO. I imagine the board was pretty happy with him at least for most of that time.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    How much of that revenue can be attributed to Balmer though? As an outsider it seems to me that all Microsoft did during Ballmer was to milk the cash cows created during Bill Gates and at the same time destroy the good will of developers and the morale of their employees. I’m assuming any big company acquires a certain inertia and will keep producing money for as long as there is demand and the supply can meet it. Just look at Apple. So what did Ballmer do that can be praised?
    - flomo 8y ago
      I won't defend Ballmer, but the guy was a salesman, a really good salesman. Not a technologist. Also Bill Gates was "chief software architect" during the Longhorn/Vista thing so he's hardly absolved of blame.

tangue 8y ago

Ballmer could have sink Microsoft in 1986. Didn’t knew that but makes sense. How many long term bids are we missing in 2018 because Ballmer-like executives are now in power ?

nikodunk 8y ago

I love how un-apologetically "skeumorphic" this blog is. Ah, I miss the days...

blackrock 8y ago
I miss that skeumorphic design. I can't wait until this flat fad goes away. It's like somebody hit the computer UI design world with a stupid stick. And all the designers woke up without the ability to see in 3 dimensions, and lived a life as Flatlanders. Gestures are fantastic though.
andrewflnr 8y ago
The best part is the loose threads. Taking the good with the bad from the real world.

skookumchuck 8y ago

At the time, Lotus was faced with a choice on where to go with Lotus 1-2-3: OS/2, Windows, or text mode. They backed the wrong horse. They were a big company at the time, could have easily bet on all three, and stayed in business.

dfox 8y ago

I assume that some variant of "bundled Windows Runtime" is the reason why trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first PC had MZ stubs, that didn't print "This program requires Microsoft Windows", but EXEC'd something like "%COMSPEC% /C WIN.COM PROGRAM.EXE"

keypusher 8y ago

As the years go by, and new stories like this come out, I find increasingly growing respect for Bill Gates.

kristianp 8y ago

Interesting that Excel was developed first for the Mac. Excel also used p-code [1][2] for its cross-platform abilities: "had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh’s 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs." It would be interesting to see the first version of excel on Mac, the windows version in the article looks very familiar. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060