5 ms·

Eh? The CD-R spec was published in 1988. By 1995 the drives were still expensive but patently heading on the road to being cheap commodity parts, by 2000 they

Eh? The CD-R spec was published in 1988. By 1995 the drives were still expensive but patently heading on the road to being cheap commodity parts, by 2000 they were clearly commodity parts fitted to many, many PCs. Microsoft had ample evidence of the possible when the feature was launched and plenty more time to correct the mistaken assumption within the next few versions. That they didn't see this coming is a terrible indictment.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
CD-R equipment was still hugely uncommon and expensive in 1994 (when many of the decisions for Windows 95 were being made). Most people didn't have the hard-drive capacity to store an entire CD-ROM, nor a computer fast enough to burn a disc without skipping. Early CD burners were SCSI equipment requiring an add-in adapter card to be used. Together this put the CD burner in the realm of the niche product used only by enthusiasts for a fairly long time (in computer years). The decision to use autorun may have been a bad decision but in historical context it was far from obvious that it was bad. The biggest failure in making the decision was in ignoring its likely longevity. By the time CD burners, usb flash drives, and always-on internet connections were ubiquitous it was fully 2 Windows releases later. It's a common failing of imagination to think that it will be easy to remedy design decision errors in later releases easily (see the Y2K bug, for example). Personally I loathe autoplay, even in its milder "prompt first" current incarnations. But the magnitude of the poorness of the decision to adopt autoplay pales in comparison to other poor decisions made at the time. The entire security model (or lack thereof) of Windows, which proved utterly unsuitable to the modern ultra-connected multi-user world. The common practice encouraged by computer manufacturers, OS manufacturers, and ISPs to put ordinary desktop computers directly on the internet rather than behind a NAT layer or proper hardware firewall. The use of null terminated strings in C/C++ along with unsafe standard libraries of string functions. And a myriad of design errors in HTTP and SMTP which have caused a mountain of security problems since. Against those autorun (which, unlike many of the above problems, can be turned off) hardly merits notice.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Well, yes, I agree in the grand scheme of short-sighted bad decisions from 15-20 years ago it's fairly low down the scale. But I'm still firmly of the opinion that the desktop CD burning revolution was decidedly foreseeable even then; I remember a UK Amiga mag editorial from the period ('94, I think) making that exact point having a disc sitting in front of them, about just how much this soom becoming a commodity product would shake up both the computer and music industries. I suppose what this really boils down to is: * Win32 predates Microsoft really thinking security was important by at least 10 years, and much of the industry by not much less * IT as a whole is terrible at looking into the future, seeing what will be viable tomorrow and designing around that. It'll be fun looking back in 2025 to see what obvious mistakes we're making now :-)
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    I'm of two minds on the subject. On the one hand any professional working in this field who doesn't appreciate that change is a constant is just plain dumb. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate that the computers of next year are going to have faster cpus, more ram, more hard drive space, etc, and that this will continue, as it has, exponentially over time. On the other hand, it's difficult to plan for the future. Even knowing that the hardware would be different it's hard to know how that will affect patterns of use and what variety of new uses will come about. If the makers of windows 95 could truly have foreseen the future of the pc in just a few years (such as the prevalence of the internet and writable large format media) they would have not merely avoided the mistake of autorun they would have built a different product. But even so, making a product that would be viable in 5 years may not result in a product that's viable on the market immediately, it can be a tricky trade-off. Windows 95 as it existed was a huge compromise on a variety of technological issues, largely to make it suitable for the consumer market of the time. The small ram footprint was very much due to significant security and fidelity compromises in running 16bit code, for example. Even after many of those reasons had gone away, the windows 9x code base was still difficult to fully replace, a classic example of the difficulty of any "full rewrite" project at scale. As I said, the biggest mistake of that decision was in failing to appreciate the longevity of design decisions. Design decisions take on a huge amount of inertia, due to a variety of factors, even when they are recognized as being poor decisions they can be difficult to change.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

CD-R equipment was still hugely uncommon and expensive in 1994 (when many of the decisions for Windows 95 were being made). Most people didn't have the hard-drive capacity to store an entire CD-ROM, nor a computer fast enough to burn a disc without skipping. Early CD burners were SCSI equipment requiring an add-in adapter card to be used. Together this put the CD burner in the realm of the niche product used only by enthusiasts for a fairly long time (in computer years). The decision to use autorun may have been a bad decision but in historical context it was far from obvious that it was bad. The biggest failure in making the decision was in ignoring its likely longevity. By the time CD burners, usb flash drives, and always-on internet connections were ubiquitous it was fully 2 Windows releases later. It's a common failing of imagination to think that it will be easy to remedy design decision errors in later releases easily (see the Y2K bug, for example). Personally I loathe autoplay, even in its milder "prompt first" current incarnations. But the magnitude of the poorness of the decision to adopt autoplay pales in comparison to other poor decisions made at the time. The entire security model (or lack thereof) of Windows, which proved utterly unsuitable to the modern ultra-connected multi-user world. The common practice encouraged by computer manufacturers, OS manufacturers, and ISPs to put ordinary desktop computers directly on the internet rather than behind a NAT layer or proper hardware firewall. The use of null terminated strings in C/C++ along with unsafe standard libraries of string functions. And a myriad of design errors in HTTP and SMTP which have caused a mountain of security problems since. Against those autorun (which, unlike many of the above problems, can be turned off) hardly merits notice.

eftpotrm 16y ago
Well, yes, I agree in the grand scheme of short-sighted bad decisions from 15-20 years ago it's fairly low down the scale. But I'm still firmly of the opinion that the desktop CD burning revolution was decidedly foreseeable even then; I remember a UK Amiga mag editorial from the period ('94, I think) making that exact point having a disc sitting in front of them, about just how much this soom becoming a commodity product would shake up both the computer and music industries. I suppose what this really boils down to is: * Win32 predates Microsoft really thinking security was important by at least 10 years, and much of the industry by not much less * IT as a whole is terrible at looking into the future, seeing what will be viable tomorrow and designing around that. It'll be fun looking back in 2025 to see what obvious mistakes we're making now :-)
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  I'm of two minds on the subject. On the one hand any professional working in this field who doesn't appreciate that change is a constant is just plain dumb. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate that the computers of next year are going to have faster cpus, more ram, more hard drive space, etc, and that this will continue, as it has, exponentially over time. On the other hand, it's difficult to plan for the future. Even knowing that the hardware would be different it's hard to know how that will affect patterns of use and what variety of new uses will come about. If the makers of windows 95 could truly have foreseen the future of the pc in just a few years (such as the prevalence of the internet and writable large format media) they would have not merely avoided the mistake of autorun they would have built a different product. But even so, making a product that would be viable in 5 years may not result in a product that's viable on the market immediately, it can be a tricky trade-off. Windows 95 as it existed was a huge compromise on a variety of technological issues, largely to make it suitable for the consumer market of the time. The small ram footprint was very much due to significant security and fidelity compromises in running 16bit code, for example. Even after many of those reasons had gone away, the windows 9x code base was still difficult to fully replace, a classic example of the difficulty of any "full rewrite" project at scale. As I said, the biggest mistake of that decision was in failing to appreciate the longevity of design decisions. Design decisions take on a huge amount of inertia, due to a variety of factors, even when they are recognized as being poor decisions they can be difficult to change.