8 ms·

The Faces of Microsoft (2017)

139 points by beefhash 6y ago

aphroz 6y ago
I am always amazed by so much effort and so much research in something that is often taken as granted and not really appreciated to its true value by most users (me included).
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  An absolutely insane amount of research, testing, and polishing went into Windows 3.11 and Windows 95, and I think the ratio of polish to code reached its peak for Microsoft. Edit: Just to clarify, I am talking mainly of the UI here, not the underlying OS, which was, of course, very basic. Although with virtualized hardware, my experience of running both Windows 95 and Windows ME have been quite good.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Polished? Windows 3.1? It was a shell over DOS. Windows 95 introduced plug and play and a decent driver model. Windows 2000 was peak MS. I could even make an argument for XP. It just didn’t hold up well in the Internet era because of all the security vulnerabilities.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      I'm mainly speaking of the UI, not the guts.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        The UI wasn’t polished either with the idea of the program manager/file manager.
        forgotmypw17 6y ago
        All I can tell you is that every single UI element was accessible with the keyboard. There is no other desktop environment I've used since then where that was the case.
    - Maakuth 6y ago
      This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. This was in effect a virtual machine implementation, to make DOS apps behave correctly under multitasking while they were implemented as if owning the whole machine. To facilitate backwards compatibility with DOS drivers, Windows 95 emulated quite a bit of DOS kernel too, with some performance penalty. Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog has a number of postings to explain all this, this perhaps being the most informative: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
      - cptskippy 6y ago
        > This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. I don't think that's true of Win 3.x, only Win 9x. They are very different beasts.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        That’s Windows 95 not Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 still used many of the Int21 Dos functions. Windows 95 could use the 16 bit DOS routines for backwards compatibility.
        Maakuth 6y ago
        I think it is sort of a continuum, with 95 being further on the path begun on Windows 3.x "386 Enhanced mode", or maybe it was like that in Windows/386 already (that was the branding for Windows 2.0). I have a feeling of reading a Raymond Chen blog post about how that worked, but my search skills fail me at this time. However, here's another site summarizing how that mode worked, allowing MS-DOS app multitasking among other things (32-bit disk I/O!): https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/ https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/
  - kanox 6y ago
    Seriously? Windows 95 and 98 were extremely prone to crashes and it took many years for Microsoft to get past a reputation for low quality. It took until Windows XP to get a reasonably stable desktop OS.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      As my other reply here notes, the thin (and permissive) virtualisation layer means that badly written applications could crash the system, but I blame that on the applications more than anything else; too bad that most people seemed to think MS was to blame, when DOS had even less protection. I used 98se as my daily OS until well into the Vista era (at which point I gradually switched into XP), and it was definitely not the "reboot multiple times a day" that some others have experienced, but then again, I also wasn't in the habit of running lots of low-quality applications either. Uptimes of over a month weren't uncommon, and were usually brought to an end more often than not due to myself doing something stupid with the application I was writing. (In fact, I've experienced far more trouble of various sorts with a recent new machine that runs Win10.)
      - iso8859-1 6y ago
        Hmm, using Windows 98 in 2007? I had so many problems with Win98 compared to Win2k, I really have trouble understanding why you'd do this. Especially because you say you only ran high quality applications. High quality software got ported to NT relatively quickly IIRC.
        jonathanlydall 6y ago
        While I also preferred Windows 2000 once available, most likely he was using Windows 98 SE, I remember it being quite reliable as Windows goes, especially compared to the nightmare that was ME. On install of Windows 98 SE I would always turn off Active Desktop and the fancy looking information left-hand side pane in Windows Explorer. Both used IE to work and would just make everything feel really slow and sluggish. It's also possible that them being disabled improved system stability.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Also, although people often praise the architecture of the NT-based line, I think 3.x and the rest of the DOS-based Windows were far more impressive; while NT is very much a "traditional" OS, 3.x and 9x are in some ways far more similar to a bare-metal hypervisor. This fact becomes very apparent when one tries to write drivers for the latter OSs, wherein you write a user-mode library that basically behaves as if it's accessing the hardware "directly" as an old DOS application would, and then write a "virtual device driver" to virtualise/multiplex the hardware among multiple "virtual machines". There's admittedly far less protection than in the NT world where all applications' (and DOS ones are run in an emulator) access to hardware needs to pass through the kernel, but the thin and permissive virtualisation layer --- where applications can essentially access the hardware directly if not "trapped" by virtual device drivers --- makes for amazingly low resource usage and high performance. A DOS application running in 3.x/9x can interact directly with the hardware and the only overhead is that of V86 mode, comparable to the full x86 vitualisation extensions (AMD-V/VT-x) introduced much later.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  It's also fascinating how many people back then had almost no background in computer science. Many had al sorts of weird backgrounds, they just found computers interesting and feel into different roles and learn everything they need on their own.
tech-historian 6y ago
The article is an interesting history lesson, but that sub-heading at the top sort of threw me for a loop, referring to Microsoft as "the first big tech company" Microsoft was, and still is, a giant tech company starting in the 90's and on. But if one looks at the digital corporate landscape back in the 1980s, IBM was an absolute behemoth. Consider this. In 1985, IBM had a market cap of $95 billion. That was more than the next 13 largest tech companies at the time, combined! This other group includes Apple, HP, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Sony, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Xerox, National Semiconductor, DEC, and Control Data. It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith. I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day, and it blew me away.
- harpratap 6y ago
  The word "tech" itself changes every decade or so. Agriculture was considered "tech" at one point of time. The companies you listed are all "electronics tech" while Microsoft is purely "software tech" which is the prevalent definition of tech today.
  - the_af 6y ago
    IBM was also a software giant. People railed against IBM as they later did against Microsoft: the big player in town, which monopolized everything and whose evil hands seemed everywhere. Likewise, managers felt safe with IBM (like they later did with Microsoft): "nobody was ever fired for buying from IBM" was a well known saying. IBM was the omnipresent giant before Microsoft became one. It's really hard to overstate this.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Except for all the hardware they make.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      It's only been a recent trend, and it's more to experiment with new form factors and nudge the PC ecosystem in right direction more than anything else. And the recent trend is for software companies to start making their own hardware (AWS making Graviton, Echo products,and Google making TPUs, Pixel) while hardware companies move into software (Apple moving into Apple Music, TV, News).
fermienrico 6y ago
I love the font used in this article. It’s an easy to read slab serif without too much slab and with lovely bits of serifs.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  How can you find out what it is called? The inspector in Chrome shows the highest preference font as LAText, but I can't find any good results when I search for that.
  - raindropm 6y ago
    It does! I use the inspect element cursor and hover at any text, it'll automatically show the popup with details and font family of said text.
    - cooper12 6y ago
      If you click the "Computed" tab next to the CSS rules, and scroll down, at the bottom there's "Rendered fonts", which confirms that it's LAText.
  - phonon 6y ago
    You can see where all the WOFF files come from here, https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-issue-01.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-issue-01.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-defaults.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-defaults.css E.g. https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/LAText/LAText-Roman.woff https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/LAText/LAText-Roman.wof... They have some license info embedded, which you can see here, if you drag over the WOFF file. https://fontdrop.info/ https://fontdrop.info/
- rishav_sharan 6y ago
  I actually found the font less readable and would have preferred some more line height.
lalos 6y ago
Reminds me of Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, he attributes the explosion of fonts to his previous studies. The bit about connecting the dots looking backwards.
saagarjha 6y ago
> The new fonts had to mimic the established core set of PostScript fonts, which included Times Roman and Helvetica. Since Monotype had originally developed the Times fonts back in the hot-metal days, that part was easy. To compete with Helvetica, though, they chose to adapt an earlier Monotype design with similar characteristics, called Arial. I’m really annoyed at this particular substitution. Yes, I understand that Linotype was being annoying, but the choice of Arial as a Helvetica replacement just grinds my gears. It’s a Helvetica replacement, all right: one worse in literally every way. It’s all the bad parts of Helvetica with none of the good ones. Helvetica is precise with its terminals; it’s styled with its graceful flourishes on letters like the capital “R”. Arial has none of that charm. But it has all the downsides of Helvetica: it’s really wide; it’s not the best for readability. Helvetica really is a pretty font, but Arial is utterly awful. I’m just so sad it ended up being given such a foundational place in digital typography. I subconsciously wince I see a default Google Doc, or when someone says to “just use Arial” when Helvetica isn’t available. I really wished they had gone with something completely different instead of using a bad-looking, copycat font.
- lioeters 6y ago
  I quite like Helvetica Neue, it just "suits my eyes" and the shapes and proportions feel so natural to me. Your rant about Arial made me curious how it came about. Ah, right, Helvetica Neue has been used for iOS and macOS for a number of years. That makes sense why it feels so familiar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_(1983) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_(1983... --- As for Arial, I found its history on the same page, as a Helvetica clone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Serif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Se... In particular, a visual comparison of a few letters with Helvetica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetica,_Arial,_MS_Sans,_Bitstream_Vera_comparison.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetic... Yes, I see what you mean about the flourish on R. Same with G, and the tail on "a". I agree that Arial is inferior for pretty much every letter in the comparison. --- Apple recently replaced Helvetica Neue with San Fransisco (the name is confusing to me, because they had a font of the same name years ago). Why Apple Abandoned the World's Most Beloved Typeface - https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-beloved-typeface/ https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-beloved... I was curious if you had any opinion on the San Fransisco font?
gfiorav 6y ago
I've been using the new Cascadia font that Windows released with their new terminal for a bit and I can say I enjoy it. It's playful. I don't use color schemes and have a white background, so this typeface provides all the joy I need/want. I don't mean this as anything more than an opinion of course. It's a matter of taste.
marsantwo 6y ago
Fantastic read, there is sufficient material for someone to author a sizable book covering the history of digital type in computing and how it came to be standardized. Digital type is such a critical part of our computing experience but so deep under the covers that is does not get any attention.
andrekandre 6y ago
as a slight aside, i found this article very easy to read... i appreciated the break-up every few paragraphs with a new heading and a picture or two makes for a big contrast to "wall of text" articles that can get tiring after a pqge or so

139 points by beefhash 6y ago

I am always amazed by so much effort and so much research in something that is often taken as granted and not really appreciated to its true value by most users (me included).

forgotmypw17 6y ago
An absolutely insane amount of research, testing, and polishing went into Windows 3.11 and Windows 95, and I think the ratio of polish to code reached its peak for Microsoft. Edit: Just to clarify, I am talking mainly of the UI here, not the underlying OS, which was, of course, very basic. Although with virtualized hardware, my experience of running both Windows 95 and Windows ME have been quite good.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Polished? Windows 3.1? It was a shell over DOS. Windows 95 introduced plug and play and a decent driver model. Windows 2000 was peak MS. I could even make an argument for XP. It just didn’t hold up well in the Internet era because of all the security vulnerabilities.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I'm mainly speaking of the UI, not the guts.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      The UI wasn’t polished either with the idea of the program manager/file manager.
      - forgotmypw17 6y ago
        All I can tell you is that every single UI element was accessible with the keyboard. There is no other desktop environment I've used since then where that was the case.
  - Maakuth 6y ago
    This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. This was in effect a virtual machine implementation, to make DOS apps behave correctly under multitasking while they were implemented as if owning the whole machine. To facilitate backwards compatibility with DOS drivers, Windows 95 emulated quite a bit of DOS kernel too, with some performance penalty. Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog has a number of postings to explain all this, this perhaps being the most informative: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      > This is common misconception, but in fact since Windows 3.x there was a kernel that did a lot of stuff but made it look like DOS was in control. I don't think that's true of Win 3.x, only Win 9x. They are very different beasts.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      That’s Windows 95 not Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 still used many of the Int21 Dos functions. Windows 95 could use the 16 bit DOS routines for backwards compatibility.
      - Maakuth 6y ago
        I think it is sort of a continuum, with 95 being further on the path begun on Windows 3.x "386 Enhanced mode", or maybe it was like that in Windows/386 already (that was the branding for Windows 2.0). I have a feeling of reading a Raymond Chen blog post about how that worked, but my search skills fail me at this time. However, here's another site summarizing how that mode worked, allowing MS-DOS app multitasking among other things (32-bit disk I/O!): https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/ https://networkencyclopedia.com/windows-3-1/
- kanox 6y ago
  Seriously? Windows 95 and 98 were extremely prone to crashes and it took many years for Microsoft to get past a reputation for low quality. It took until Windows XP to get a reasonably stable desktop OS.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    As my other reply here notes, the thin (and permissive) virtualisation layer means that badly written applications could crash the system, but I blame that on the applications more than anything else; too bad that most people seemed to think MS was to blame, when DOS had even less protection. I used 98se as my daily OS until well into the Vista era (at which point I gradually switched into XP), and it was definitely not the "reboot multiple times a day" that some others have experienced, but then again, I also wasn't in the habit of running lots of low-quality applications either. Uptimes of over a month weren't uncommon, and were usually brought to an end more often than not due to myself doing something stupid with the application I was writing. (In fact, I've experienced far more trouble of various sorts with a recent new machine that runs Win10.)
    - iso8859-1 6y ago
      Hmm, using Windows 98 in 2007? I had so many problems with Win98 compared to Win2k, I really have trouble understanding why you'd do this. Especially because you say you only ran high quality applications. High quality software got ported to NT relatively quickly IIRC.
      - jonathanlydall 6y ago
        While I also preferred Windows 2000 once available, most likely he was using Windows 98 SE, I remember it being quite reliable as Windows goes, especially compared to the nightmare that was ME. On install of Windows 98 SE I would always turn off Active Desktop and the fancy looking information left-hand side pane in Windows Explorer. Both used IE to work and would just make everything feel really slow and sluggish. It's also possible that them being disabled improved system stability.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Also, although people often praise the architecture of the NT-based line, I think 3.x and the rest of the DOS-based Windows were far more impressive; while NT is very much a "traditional" OS, 3.x and 9x are in some ways far more similar to a bare-metal hypervisor. This fact becomes very apparent when one tries to write drivers for the latter OSs, wherein you write a user-mode library that basically behaves as if it's accessing the hardware "directly" as an old DOS application would, and then write a "virtual device driver" to virtualise/multiplex the hardware among multiple "virtual machines". There's admittedly far less protection than in the NT world where all applications' (and DOS ones are run in an emulator) access to hardware needs to pass through the kernel, but the thin and permissive virtualisation layer --- where applications can essentially access the hardware directly if not "trapped" by virtual device drivers --- makes for amazingly low resource usage and high performance. A DOS application running in 3.x/9x can interact directly with the hardware and the only overhead is that of V86 mode, comparable to the full x86 vitualisation extensions (AMD-V/VT-x) introduced much later.
mrweasel 6y ago
It's also fascinating how many people back then had almost no background in computer science. Many had al sorts of weird backgrounds, they just found computers interesting and feel into different roles and learn everything they need on their own.

tech-historian 6y ago

The article is an interesting history lesson, but that sub-heading at the top sort of threw me for a loop, referring to Microsoft as "the first big tech company" Microsoft was, and still is, a giant tech company starting in the 90's and on. But if one looks at the digital corporate landscape back in the 1980s, IBM was an absolute behemoth. Consider this. In 1985, IBM had a market cap of $95 billion. That was more than the next 13 largest tech companies at the time, combined! This other group includes Apple, HP, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Sony, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Xerox, National Semiconductor, DEC, and Control Data. It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith. I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day, and it blew me away.

harpratap 6y ago
The word "tech" itself changes every decade or so. Agriculture was considered "tech" at one point of time. The companies you listed are all "electronics tech" while Microsoft is purely "software tech" which is the prevalent definition of tech today.
- the_af 6y ago
  IBM was also a software giant. People railed against IBM as they later did against Microsoft: the big player in town, which monopolized everything and whose evil hands seemed everywhere. Likewise, managers felt safe with IBM (like they later did with Microsoft): "nobody was ever fired for buying from IBM" was a well known saying. IBM was the omnipresent giant before Microsoft became one. It's really hard to overstate this.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Except for all the hardware they make.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    It's only been a recent trend, and it's more to experiment with new form factors and nudge the PC ecosystem in right direction more than anything else. And the recent trend is for software companies to start making their own hardware (AWS making Graviton, Echo products,and Google making TPUs, Pixel) while hardware companies move into software (Apple moving into Apple Music, TV, News).

fermienrico 6y ago

I love the font used in this article. It’s an easy to read slab serif without too much slab and with lovely bits of serifs.

iso8859-1 6y ago
How can you find out what it is called? The inspector in Chrome shows the highest preference font as LAText, but I can't find any good results when I search for that.
- raindropm 6y ago
  It does! I use the inspect element cursor and hover at any text, it'll automatically show the popup with details and font family of said text.
  - cooper12 6y ago
    If you click the "Computed" tab next to the CSS rules, and scroll down, at the bottom there's "Rendered fonts", which confirms that it's LAText.
- phonon 6y ago
  You can see where all the WOFF files come from here, https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-issue-01.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-issue-01.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-defaults.css https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/fonts-defaults.css E.g. https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/LAText/LAText-Roman.woff https://www.typemag.org/assets/fonts/LAText/LAText-Roman.wof... They have some license info embedded, which you can see here, if you drag over the WOFF file. https://fontdrop.info/ https://fontdrop.info/
rishav_sharan 6y ago
I actually found the font less readable and would have preferred some more line height.

lalos 6y ago

Reminds me of Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, he attributes the explosion of fonts to his previous studies. The bit about connecting the dots looking backwards.

saagarjha 6y ago

> The new fonts had to mimic the established core set of PostScript fonts, which included Times Roman and Helvetica. Since Monotype had originally developed the Times fonts back in the hot-metal days, that part was easy. To compete with Helvetica, though, they chose to adapt an earlier Monotype design with similar characteristics, called Arial. I’m really annoyed at this particular substitution. Yes, I understand that Linotype was being annoying, but the choice of Arial as a Helvetica replacement just grinds my gears. It’s a Helvetica replacement, all right: one worse in literally every way. It’s all the bad parts of Helvetica with none of the good ones. Helvetica is precise with its terminals; it’s styled with its graceful flourishes on letters like the capital “R”. Arial has none of that charm. But it has all the downsides of Helvetica: it’s really wide; it’s not the best for readability. Helvetica really is a pretty font, but Arial is utterly awful. I’m just so sad it ended up being given such a foundational place in digital typography. I subconsciously wince I see a default Google Doc, or when someone says to “just use Arial” when Helvetica isn’t available. I really wished they had gone with something completely different instead of using a bad-looking, copycat font.

lioeters 6y ago
I quite like Helvetica Neue, it just "suits my eyes" and the shapes and proportions feel so natural to me. Your rant about Arial made me curious how it came about. Ah, right, Helvetica Neue has been used for iOS and macOS for a number of years. That makes sense why it feels so familiar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_(1983) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_(1983... --- As for Arial, I found its history on the same page, as a Helvetica clone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Serif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Se... In particular, a visual comparison of a few letters with Helvetica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetica,_Arial,_MS_Sans,_Bitstream_Vera_comparison.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetic... Yes, I see what you mean about the flourish on R. Same with G, and the tail on "a". I agree that Arial is inferior for pretty much every letter in the comparison. --- Apple recently replaced Helvetica Neue with San Fransisco (the name is confusing to me, because they had a font of the same name years ago). Why Apple Abandoned the World's Most Beloved Typeface - https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-beloved-typeface/ https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-beloved... I was curious if you had any opinion on the San Fransisco font?

gfiorav 6y ago

I've been using the new Cascadia font that Windows released with their new terminal for a bit and I can say I enjoy it. It's playful. I don't use color schemes and have a white background, so this typeface provides all the joy I need/want. I don't mean this as anything more than an opinion of course. It's a matter of taste.

marsantwo 6y ago

Fantastic read, there is sufficient material for someone to author a sizable book covering the history of digital type in computing and how it came to be standardized. Digital type is such a critical part of our computing experience but so deep under the covers that is does not get any attention.

andrekandre 6y ago

as a slight aside, i found this article very easy to read... i appreciated the break-up every few paragraphs with a new heading and a picture or two makes for a big contrast to "wall of text" articles that can get tiring after a pqge or so