5 ms·

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 share

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.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      Microsoft co-founded the BSA because the software piracy rent-a-cops of the day -- the SPA -- sided with the DoJ in the antitrust suit against Microsoft.
- bitwize 8y ago
  It didn't catch on until Windows 3 because Windows 3 was the first Windows version to come preinstalled on new PCs. Microsoft knew then what the Linux folks never understood -- preinstallation is key.
  - ptx 8y ago
    That preinstallation is key was widely understood, which is why Microsoft structured their agreements with OEMs to make selling machines with non-Microsoft operating systems very difficult.
acheron 8y ago
I knew nothing of that Excel story before this article, despite being generally familiar with a lot of MS and Windows history. It definitely seems more obscure than it should be, at least to me. (At the time I was still 100% MS-DOS; I never encountered Windows until 3.0. Plus I was young enough that my main exposure to business/spreadsheet software was through my dad, who was a loyal 1-2-3 user and remained so for many years afterwards.)
rogerbinns 8y ago
I used a few apps with the captive Windows runtime back in the day. It was highly frustrating because the app it was bundled with worked great, but if you wanted to do anything else (eg view other files) then Windows wouldn't let you because it wasn't the full product. As a user the bundled Windows wasn't perceived as a benefit, since it consumed so much more hard disk space and had higher memory requirements etc. The driver situation was often dire too since established apps had established drivers, while early Windows had whatever few Microsoft had written. Microsoft was also obviously pushing the Windows agenda, after many delays and much competition as outlined in earlier articles in the series. In case anyone wants to fix it, I also have a bug report from the one time I used Windows 1 as a kid. I used the paint program and went to save. A standard file dialog didn't exist as part of Windows until 3.1 (1992), so before then each app was on its own. Paint gave a single line edit control where you typed in the whole pathname (no browsing or similar). Back then DOS had a 64 byte pathname limit but the dialog let you keep entering characters, so I did. When I hit save, nothing happened except brief blips of the hard drive light. I had to reset the machine and found that this buffer overflow had resulted in most of the entries in the root directory being deleted! A quick disk edit tool and they were fixed (a flag is set on directory entries to say deleted so you just had to undo the flag providing you didn't create new files to overwrite these entries). An intriguing product from the era was Desqview/X. You got a full blown X server and so could direct Unix programs to display on DOS. It could also export DOS programs to other X servers. If it had succeeded, then in this alternate reality apps would run on unix and PCs would be good for games and accessing those "real" apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#DESQview/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#DESQview/X
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  > I used a few apps with the captive Windows runtime back in the day. It was highly frustrating because the app it was bundled with worked great, but if you wanted to do anything else (eg view other files) then Windows wouldn't let you because it wasn't the full product. In other words, working as intended. I mean, that's basically what you got with old DOS apps. You could spawn a new command.com from within the app if you were lucky, but that's not nearly the same as multitasking. You had a stack of programs running and had to completely exit the second one again to get back to the first. So windows didn't really take anything away but gave you a pretty good GUI.

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.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Microsoft co-founded the BSA because the software piracy rent-a-cops of the day -- the SPA -- sided with the DoJ in the antitrust suit against Microsoft.
bitwize 8y ago
It didn't catch on until Windows 3 because Windows 3 was the first Windows version to come preinstalled on new PCs. Microsoft knew then what the Linux folks never understood -- preinstallation is key.
- ptx 8y ago
  That preinstallation is key was widely understood, which is why Microsoft structured their agreements with OEMs to make selling machines with non-Microsoft operating systems very difficult.

acheron 8y ago

I knew nothing of that Excel story before this article, despite being generally familiar with a lot of MS and Windows history. It definitely seems more obscure than it should be, at least to me. (At the time I was still 100% MS-DOS; I never encountered Windows until 3.0. Plus I was young enough that my main exposure to business/spreadsheet software was through my dad, who was a loyal 1-2-3 user and remained so for many years afterwards.)

rogerbinns 8y ago

I used a few apps with the captive Windows runtime back in the day. It was highly frustrating because the app it was bundled with worked great, but if you wanted to do anything else (eg view other files) then Windows wouldn't let you because it wasn't the full product. As a user the bundled Windows wasn't perceived as a benefit, since it consumed so much more hard disk space and had higher memory requirements etc. The driver situation was often dire too since established apps had established drivers, while early Windows had whatever few Microsoft had written. Microsoft was also obviously pushing the Windows agenda, after many delays and much competition as outlined in earlier articles in the series. In case anyone wants to fix it, I also have a bug report from the one time I used Windows 1 as a kid. I used the paint program and went to save. A standard file dialog didn't exist as part of Windows until 3.1 (1992), so before then each app was on its own. Paint gave a single line edit control where you typed in the whole pathname (no browsing or similar). Back then DOS had a 64 byte pathname limit but the dialog let you keep entering characters, so I did. When I hit save, nothing happened except brief blips of the hard drive light. I had to reset the machine and found that this buffer overflow had resulted in most of the entries in the root directory being deleted! A quick disk edit tool and they were fixed (a flag is set on directory entries to say deleted so you just had to undo the flag providing you didn't create new files to overwrite these entries). An intriguing product from the era was Desqview/X. You got a full blown X server and so could direct Unix programs to display on DOS. It could also export DOS programs to other X servers. If it had succeeded, then in this alternate reality apps would run on unix and PCs would be good for games and accessing those "real" apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#DESQview/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview#DESQview/X

iforgotpassword 8y ago
> I used a few apps with the captive Windows runtime back in the day. It was highly frustrating because the app it was bundled with worked great, but if you wanted to do anything else (eg view other files) then Windows wouldn't let you because it wasn't the full product. In other words, working as intended. I mean, that's basically what you got with old DOS apps. You could spawn a new command.com from within the app if you were lucky, but that's not nearly the same as multitasking. You had a stack of programs running and had to completely exit the second one again to get back to the first. So windows didn't really take anything away but gave you a pretty good GUI.