5 ms·

Curious if this resonates with others. That is hard to believe but I wasn’t around to have an opinion.

altcognito 7y ago
I was around and this doesn’t ring a bell.
naikrovek 7y ago
Windows OS quality has varied quite a bit, and I think it is unfair to call the majority of Windows "batshit insane." It isn't a knowledgeable opinion and it isn't necessarily fair, either. There ARE plenty of mistakes in the history of Windows, don't get me wrong. Microsoft has gone well out of their way to keep backwards compatibility from release to release, even if it means other features won't be added. Every few years they break this trend and they give everyone multiple years of notice. There are often very good reasons for some of the things that appear to be insane, as any regular reader of Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog will testify. Arguably, if anyone I know of would have a valid opinion of Windows' level of insanity, it would be Raymond Chen, as he's had his hands in the Windows source code for 2-3 decades at this point. He continues to work as a developer at Microsoft, so I'm quite confident that the level of "batshit insanity" in Windows is quite low and getting lower by the day.
ncmncm 7y ago
People who lived it could be forgiven for wanting to forget. I never had any direct contact with Microsoft code, but was surrounded by people who did. It should be noted that Windows NT/Vista/XP/7/8/10 are a different lineage, and carry very little code from the 3.1/3.11/95/98/Me codebase, aside from some UI subsystems. There was not much contact between the two groups, and (I was told) a fair bit of bad blood. If you find somebody claiming that crashes were not, at minimum, a daily event on W95, you may commiserate over their amnesia. Many people ran Windows programs under OS/2, where only the programs would crash, not the OS, and so less often, and they did not need to reinstall the OS.
- acqq 7y ago
  > I never had any direct contact with Microsoft code So your claims are rather reflecting your memory of your interaction with the people who did have the direct contact, and not the actual state. In reality, Windows 3.0 and 3.1 is hugely different from 3.11, and from 95/98/Me. Starting with 3.11, there was actually the of code avoiding the lower lever calls to BIOS and DOS if possible (if the hardware allowed) but using the new 32-bit code instead. The stability of the OS was definitely not as you describe, one could surely use the system for days without having the system crashes. The system's design was the effect of the engineering goal of having a system that can work with very small amounts of memory, compared to the competing safer systems. With more memory available on the computer to implement the "hardware" memory protection one was able to use the "safer" systems like NT. The wide use of that lineage vs. NT was a strong reflection of the market needs: people did have the computers with too little RAM for the "safer" systems but still wanted to run the programs that had the functionality they needed. Additionally, the "safer" system not only demanded more RAM, but were often for some tasks less convenient. A lot of users who "had to reinstall the system often" were actively doing "unhealthy" steps themselves: "trying" the software they didn't need, which did the interventions on the system which damaged the system. The programs running on the OS (even on NT) typically did tend to crash regularly, however. Especially including the biggest like Microsoft Word. Fascinatingly, that was by design: it was the "knowledge" of the managers that delivering fast the new versions of programs with more features was more important than the code correctness. Just like in the web world more recently...
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Wow, two, three whole days without a crash!? Imagine! At the time, people running Linux on the same hardware resented being obliged to shut down after six months to upgrade their OS or disk storage. Back then, Linux was much less professionally maintained, but if it ever crashed at all it was a big deal. OS/2 likewise. Windows crashes were not just for tinkerers. In any office, secretaries and receptionists were very used to re-booting in midday, despite shutting the machines off every night. They considered it completely normal.
    - 7y ago
rswail 7y ago
Getting an 80286 or 80386 out of 8086/8088 mode to address more memory required access to the A20 address line. Which IBM added to the keyboard controller on the motherboard. Which lead to the A20 hacks necessary to access memory above 1MB (let alone the hacks already in place to access over 640K). Note that this hack has required CPU support up to Intel Haswell which is only 5-6 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line
- consp 7y ago
  Actually, the hack is to fix the incorrect behavior of the processor in real mode (not lowering line 20 to 0). The fact that it was put into the keyboard controller was probably as it is a simple soc[1] with (in the case of a keyboard controller) about 256 bytes of ram and about 1-4K of rom. Which resources was probably still available to the motherboard designers without complicated logic or additional components. It is not the weirdest fix to imagine. note: modern variant of the keyboard controller can sometimes be flashed which is fun to play around with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48
Frondo 7y ago
I was also around and never heard of anyone describing "crash" to mean "need to reinstall OS". Always in the same Linux sense, which absolutely was a breath of fresh air by comparison.

I was around and this doesn’t ring a bell.

Windows OS quality has varied quite a bit, and I think it is unfair to call the majority of Windows "batshit insane." It isn't a knowledgeable opinion and it isn't necessarily fair, either. There ARE plenty of mistakes in the history of Windows, don't get me wrong. Microsoft has gone well out of their way to keep backwards compatibility from release to release, even if it means other features won't be added. Every few years they break this trend and they give everyone multiple years of notice. There are often very good reasons for some of the things that appear to be insane, as any regular reader of Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog will testify. Arguably, if anyone I know of would have a valid opinion of Windows' level of insanity, it would be Raymond Chen, as he's had his hands in the Windows source code for 2-3 decades at this point. He continues to work as a developer at Microsoft, so I'm quite confident that the level of "batshit insanity" in Windows is quite low and getting lower by the day.

ncmncm 7y ago

People who lived it could be forgiven for wanting to forget. I never had any direct contact with Microsoft code, but was surrounded by people who did. It should be noted that Windows NT/Vista/XP/7/8/10 are a different lineage, and carry very little code from the 3.1/3.11/95/98/Me codebase, aside from some UI subsystems. There was not much contact between the two groups, and (I was told) a fair bit of bad blood. If you find somebody claiming that crashes were not, at minimum, a daily event on W95, you may commiserate over their amnesia. Many people ran Windows programs under OS/2, where only the programs would crash, not the OS, and so less often, and they did not need to reinstall the OS.

acqq 7y ago
> I never had any direct contact with Microsoft code So your claims are rather reflecting your memory of your interaction with the people who did have the direct contact, and not the actual state. In reality, Windows 3.0 and 3.1 is hugely different from 3.11, and from 95/98/Me. Starting with 3.11, there was actually the of code avoiding the lower lever calls to BIOS and DOS if possible (if the hardware allowed) but using the new 32-bit code instead. The stability of the OS was definitely not as you describe, one could surely use the system for days without having the system crashes. The system's design was the effect of the engineering goal of having a system that can work with very small amounts of memory, compared to the competing safer systems. With more memory available on the computer to implement the "hardware" memory protection one was able to use the "safer" systems like NT. The wide use of that lineage vs. NT was a strong reflection of the market needs: people did have the computers with too little RAM for the "safer" systems but still wanted to run the programs that had the functionality they needed. Additionally, the "safer" system not only demanded more RAM, but were often for some tasks less convenient. A lot of users who "had to reinstall the system often" were actively doing "unhealthy" steps themselves: "trying" the software they didn't need, which did the interventions on the system which damaged the system. The programs running on the OS (even on NT) typically did tend to crash regularly, however. Especially including the biggest like Microsoft Word. Fascinatingly, that was by design: it was the "knowledge" of the managers that delivering fast the new versions of programs with more features was more important than the code correctness. Just like in the web world more recently...
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Wow, two, three whole days without a crash!? Imagine! At the time, people running Linux on the same hardware resented being obliged to shut down after six months to upgrade their OS or disk storage. Back then, Linux was much less professionally maintained, but if it ever crashed at all it was a big deal. OS/2 likewise. Windows crashes were not just for tinkerers. In any office, secretaries and receptionists were very used to re-booting in midday, despite shutting the machines off every night. They considered it completely normal.
  - 7y ago

rswail 7y ago

Getting an 80286 or 80386 out of 8086/8088 mode to address more memory required access to the A20 address line. Which IBM added to the keyboard controller on the motherboard. Which lead to the A20 hacks necessary to access memory above 1MB (let alone the hacks already in place to access over 640K). Note that this hack has required CPU support up to Intel Haswell which is only 5-6 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line

consp 7y ago
Actually, the hack is to fix the incorrect behavior of the processor in real mode (not lowering line 20 to 0). The fact that it was put into the keyboard controller was probably as it is a simple soc[1] with (in the case of a keyboard controller) about 256 bytes of ram and about 1-4K of rom. Which resources was probably still available to the motherboard designers without complicated logic or additional components. It is not the weirdest fix to imagine. note: modern variant of the keyboard controller can sometimes be flashed which is fun to play around with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48

Frondo 7y ago

I was also around and never heard of anyone describing "crash" to mean "need to reinstall OS". Always in the same Linux sense, which absolutely was a breath of fresh air by comparison.