4 ms·

To be fair, while I remember the Windows 95 shell being quite snappy on a 133 MHz 5x86, it’s not exactly the epitome of the suckless ideal internally—it’s cente

To be fair, while I remember the Windows 95 shell being quite snappy on a 133 MHz 5x86, it’s not exactly the epitome of the suckless ideal internally—it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!), has a full-blown object browser under the guise of Explorer, and to avoid the slowness all of that causes, has a restricted reimplementation of COM inside[1] that through carnal knowledge of Windows internals is capable of interoperating with the system one. One would think displaying seconds[2] would be the least of its problems, but apparently not. (Maybe the Unicode-only TrueType renderer really hurts that much? Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?) [1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_whats_the_difference_between_shgetmalloc_shalloc_cogetmalloc_and_cotaskmemalloc.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_... [2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_why_doesnt_the_clock_in_the_taskbar_display_seconds.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_...

toyg 3y ago
Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  I think serenityOS is heading that direction: "Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix." https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    Anybody interested in Serenity or in OS design in general would probably love the youtube channel[0] of Andreas Kling, the primary author. He streams videos porting games and applications to Serenity, deep dives on individual issues, etc. Great content.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      [0] https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling/videos https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling/videos
  - theodric 3y ago
    I'd be delighted if something like SerenityOS, or Haiku, or hell, even ReactOS could gain enough traction to develop into a viable desktop OS during my lifetime. But I'm too dumb to do it on my own, too burned-out to become less dumb, and too jaded to feel passionate about something like that again after being rug-pulled since the 1990s. Back when I was richer, I threw money at Haiku, but in ~20 years it hasn't really shaped up into something that will supplant any of the big boys. Pipe dream. Sadly.
    - LeFantome 3y ago
      I love SerenityOS. Hard to say how long it will take to become viable on real hardware though. It does not seem to be a priority for the project. Haiku feels like it is getting very close. I have been meaning to give it a serious shot. ReactOS feels like it is never going to get there. It is a real shame. Honestly, what I want is Serenity Linux. The Linux kernel and drivers are already fine. If it booted into the SerenityOS WindowServer ( and maybe ran Podman ), it would be perfect!
- jerf 3y ago
  If you put your mind to it a bit, you can approximate this on Linux today. There's a lot of options other than Gnome and KDE, and the XWindows ecosystem may be a bit "out of date" but it's extremely mature and very, very pluggable. And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser. The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.
  - treadmill 3y ago
    This.
- skissane 3y ago
  > A "Windows 2095" I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like, if Windows (or humanity) is still around by then. I’m pretty sure I won’t be. Maybe: Windows 2095 has a chat window which connects to an AI at Microsoft HQ. That AI has full access to the Windows source code. If there is something about Windows you don’t like, complain to the AI and it will modify the Windows source code to create a patched version fixing the thing that annoys you. The binary patch will be downloaded and hot-applied without reboot.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    Are we talking about the same Microsoft?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - LeFantome 3y ago
      It is implied that it will also install a personal shopping assistant and book-keeper that will track how much you have to spend and make recommendations. It might even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you will like or need that offer generous return policies. Oh, and it will break a few other things so you have to ask it again. Right after it posts to your social media some deep fakes about how much you love the stuff it bought.
      - toyg 3y ago
        > It WILL even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you SHALL like or need FTFY. This will be unlike MacOS (which, by then, will have probably rebranded 5 times into something like OneOS, AiOS, or ${latestFad}OS), which will simply take a percentage of your bank-account balance every month, in exchange for good feelings and a fake sense of belonging.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like Taking into account the evolution of the MS OS in the latest years, i would say that in 2090 Windows will look like CP/M.
TonyTrapp 3y ago
> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!) While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer). > Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache? Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked: > saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  >> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!) > While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer). True, but does not contradict what I said: OLECHAR was 16 bits on all Win32 implementations—witness the OLE2ANSI shim on old VC++ versions that allowed you to pretend it wasn’t (it was 8 bits on Win16 and IIRC on the Macintosh port). Consequently, Unicode strings were used throughout the new COM-based NT4/95+ shell APIs, even on 9x/Me. I remember reading that the TrueType implementation used Unicode everywhere as well, even on non-NT where you could only get to it via MessageBoxW and ExtTextOutW. >> Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache? > Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked: >> saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks > Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands. I don’t think it’s all that obvious. On a typical Win95 box the taskbar clock is what, probably around 16 pixels or so high? With non-antialiased fonts, that’s eleven (ten digits and a colon) bitmaps of (generously) 16x16 bits, so under 400 bytes, a full order of magnitude below 4K. There are probably other places in the Windows shell you can shave half a resident K off of, even separating hot and cold data in the linker is liable to get you that much. (Keeping the window procedure of the taskbar paged in—also mentioned in the article—is probably a bigger issue, although doesn’t it mean in the intended state the system will page when the user wants to interact with the taskbar? That doesn’t sound pleasant. The whole thing might also have come very late in the development cycle—I seem to remember there was a registry setting that brought the seconds back, so the code wasn’t even removed.)

toyg 3y ago

Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.

mysterydip 3y ago
I think serenityOS is heading that direction: "Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix." https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  Anybody interested in Serenity or in OS design in general would probably love the youtube channel[0] of Andreas Kling, the primary author. He streams videos porting games and applications to Serenity, deep dives on individual issues, etc. Great content.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    [0] https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling/videos https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling/videos
- theodric 3y ago
  I'd be delighted if something like SerenityOS, or Haiku, or hell, even ReactOS could gain enough traction to develop into a viable desktop OS during my lifetime. But I'm too dumb to do it on my own, too burned-out to become less dumb, and too jaded to feel passionate about something like that again after being rug-pulled since the 1990s. Back when I was richer, I threw money at Haiku, but in ~20 years it hasn't really shaped up into something that will supplant any of the big boys. Pipe dream. Sadly.
  - LeFantome 3y ago
    I love SerenityOS. Hard to say how long it will take to become viable on real hardware though. It does not seem to be a priority for the project. Haiku feels like it is getting very close. I have been meaning to give it a serious shot. ReactOS feels like it is never going to get there. It is a real shame. Honestly, what I want is Serenity Linux. The Linux kernel and drivers are already fine. If it booted into the SerenityOS WindowServer ( and maybe ran Podman ), it would be perfect!
jerf 3y ago
If you put your mind to it a bit, you can approximate this on Linux today. There's a lot of options other than Gnome and KDE, and the XWindows ecosystem may be a bit "out of date" but it's extremely mature and very, very pluggable. And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser. The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.
- treadmill 3y ago
  This.
skissane 3y ago
> A "Windows 2095" I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like, if Windows (or humanity) is still around by then. I’m pretty sure I won’t be. Maybe: Windows 2095 has a chat window which connects to an AI at Microsoft HQ. That AI has full access to the Windows source code. If there is something about Windows you don’t like, complain to the AI and it will modify the Windows source code to create a patched version fixing the thing that annoys you. The binary patch will be downloaded and hot-applied without reboot.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  Are we talking about the same Microsoft?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - LeFantome 3y ago
    It is implied that it will also install a personal shopping assistant and book-keeper that will track how much you have to spend and make recommendations. It might even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you will like or need that offer generous return policies. Oh, and it will break a few other things so you have to ask it again. Right after it posts to your social media some deep fakes about how much you love the stuff it bought.
    - toyg 3y ago
      > It WILL even take the liberty of ordering things it knows you SHALL like or need FTFY. This will be unlike MacOS (which, by then, will have probably rebranded 5 times into something like OneOS, AiOS, or ${latestFad}OS), which will simply take a percentage of your bank-account balance every month, in exchange for good feelings and a fake sense of belonging.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like Taking into account the evolution of the MS OS in the latest years, i would say that in 2090 Windows will look like CP/M.

TonyTrapp 3y ago

> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!) While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer). > Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache? Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked: > saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands.

mananaysiempre 3y ago
>> it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!) > While NT was Unicode internally, Windows 9x barely had any WinAPI functionality implemented with wide strings, for the most part only ANSI versions of the APIs were available (unless you were using the much later released UNICOWS compatibility layer). True, but does not contradict what I said: OLECHAR was 16 bits on all Win32 implementations—witness the OLE2ANSI shim on old VC++ versions that allowed you to pretend it wasn’t (it was 8 bits on Win16 and IIRC on the Macintosh port). Consequently, Unicode strings were used throughout the new COM-based NT4/95+ shell APIs, even on 9x/Me. I remember reading that the TrueType implementation used Unicode everywhere as well, even on non-NT where you could only get to it via MessageBoxW and ExtTextOutW. >> Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache? > Come on, the answer is right there in the article you linked: >> saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks > Granted, you won't need a full 4K of memory for those digits, but the point still stands. I don’t think it’s all that obvious. On a typical Win95 box the taskbar clock is what, probably around 16 pixels or so high? With non-antialiased fonts, that’s eleven (ten digits and a colon) bitmaps of (generously) 16x16 bits, so under 400 bytes, a full order of magnitude below 4K. There are probably other places in the Windows shell you can shave half a resident K off of, even separating hot and cold data in the linker is liable to get you that much. (Keeping the window procedure of the taskbar paged in—also mentioned in the article—is probably a bigger issue, although doesn’t it mean in the intended state the system will page when the user wants to interact with the taskbar? That doesn’t sound pleasant. The whole thing might also have come very late in the development cycle—I seem to remember there was a registry setting that brought the seconds back, so the code wasn’t even removed.)