5 ms·

>Keep in mind that this isn't an isolated case True, this is one case that isn't mentioned much, but this gave Excel and Word its massive market share. When W

by jmclnx 3y ago

>Keep in mind that this isn't an isolated case True, this is one case that isn't mentioned much, but this gave Excel and Word its massive market share. When Windows 95 was being developed, MS kept telling Lotus (and maybe Word Perfect) that OS/2 was the real future, so Lotus was focusing on a GUI version of their main product for OS/2. And Notes was originally developed on OS/2. So Lotus had a nice version of 123 for OS/2 about to go, but the had to shift gears to Windows when W95 was released. Also there were rumors that MS was keeping some APIs secret to make it appear their products were faster than competitors. When W95 came out, by magic, MS had a GUI version of Excel and Word, thus eventually killing those companies. Lotus had to shift gears and may have lost a couple of years to MS.

jojobas 3y ago
GUI Excel 2.2 was released for Windows 2.0 in 1989, 3 major releases before Office for Windows 95. Essentially same for Word. WordPerfect had a perfectly working GUI version for Windows by 1994, it just couldn't compete with Word. Same for Lotus123, they were out of fashion long before Windows 95.
mike_hearn 3y ago
I used to work on Wine and don't recall encountering any APIs that made things magically faster. That was a popular rumour on Slashdot in the early 2000s because at the time, most devs were unaware of how IE could start so much faster than Mozilla, and how MS Office could start so much faster than OpenOffice. Cheating via pre-loading was assumed. It was eventually proven that this couldn't be the case when these apps started faster than their competitors even on Wine on Linux. The actual cause was that MS cared about and heavily optimized startup time. No magic. The OS/2 history isn't quite how I remember it. The fact there'd be a new version of Windows surprised nobody. Chicago development wasn't exactly a secret that caught anyone unawares. Also OS/2 Warp came out before Windows 95 did.
- jve 3y ago
  So much stuff thrown within this submission comments. One can wonder how much of this is misinformation, because someone once said something and the other one echoes it back...
- amiga386 3y ago
  No offense, but I don't think you looked too hard. There are lots of calls that could be used to do things in a more performant way, or to make things possible that were not possible using documented APIs. [0] Generally speaking though, what you say is true. There are certainly no "magically faster" API calls. There are thousands of undocumented calls that, if you were aligned with the internal team at Microsoft that wrote them, allowed you to write better performing code than if you were a third party. And as a major developer inside Microsoft, you had the power to get API calls created for your needs, while third parties didn't. That is the crux of the matter. Here's one straight from the site we're discussing today, the IOwnerDataCallback interface [0] makes it possible to do grouping on a virtual ListView. Windows Explorer uses it to great effect, everyone else can't use it. [2] [0] http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ [1] https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/comctl32/controls/listview/interfaces/iownerdatacallback.htm https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/comctl32... [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35197/Undocumented-List-View-Features https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35197/Undocumented-List...
  - mschaef 3y ago
    > No offense, but I don't think you looked too hard. There are lots of calls that could be used to do things in a more performant way, Undocumented API calls were rumored to be a big deal even back in the Windows 3.x days. I remember reading through this at the time looking for the 'smoking gun'. https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Microsoft-Programming/dp/0201608340 https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micr... There were some cute and offensive names, and a few interesting details about the internal implementation of Windows, but nothing that would've been hugely beneficial. Things might well have changed since then. (Both at Microsoft and at Apple, where their software is definitely allowed to do things that third party software is not.)
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Of course there are internal APIs, every OS has those. I don't know of any that would make the difference between an app being competitive and not, certainly not in that timeframe. Grouping on a virtual list view was added in Vista which is after I stopped working on Wine, but again, that is hardly the sort of thing that makes or breaks apps. Most competing office suites and browsers don't even use comctl32 at all, preferring to roll their own widgets for portability reasons. The reasons IE and Office were so fast to start was due entirely to heavy optimization. In particular Microsoft were very good at doing profile guided re-ordering of code pages to minimize HDD head movements, which was critical in an era when hard disks were the only storage medium and also much slower. The Linux toolchains didn't have anything like that and the technique wasn't even well known outside of Microsoft back then, so to GNU hackers the results appeared to be almost magic. OpenOffice or Mozilla would take like 30 seconds to start and Word/IE could start in 3. So what thousands of calls are you thinking of? To give MS such a huge competitive advantage that other companies get wiped out they'd need to have done stuff like kept a new DirectX back only for themselves. Back then they didn't even have the technology to do that. Even your link where you say people "can't do that" is about how to use that private API you named. Blocking that sort of thing requires pervasive code signing, package identity and for that to be propagated robustly through IPC. Even today Windows is kinda ropey in that regard (vs macOS/iOS where robustly enforced Apple only APIs are widespread and critical, e.g. mmap +x is an Apple-private API on macOS).
skissane 3y ago
> When Windows 95 was being developed, MS kept telling Lotus (and maybe Word Perfect) that OS/2 was the real future, so Lotus was focusing on a GUI version of their main product for OS/2. And Notes was originally developed on OS/2. This story doesn’t make sense to me. IBM and Microsoft’s falling out was public knowledge by July 1991 - there was an article about it in the New York Times. [0] Windows 95 wasn’t released until July/August 1995 - 4 years later. Everyone who was paying attention knew by mid-1991 that Microsoft’s future was Windows not OS/2. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/business/microsoft-widens-its-split-with-ibm-over-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/business/microsoft-widens...
lproven 3y ago
You have the timeline all messed up. Excel and Word both ran on Windows 2.0 (released Dec 1987). I supported Excel on Windows 2 in production. In the late 1980s, yes, Microsoft and IBM told the industry that OS/2 was the future, because they both thought it was. OS/2 1.0 was released the same month as Win 2.0) had no GUI, because it wasn't ready. OS/2 1.1 had in, released nearly a year later in Nov '88. This was what Lotus and others needed. 1.1 was not good and barely worked. For example, OS/2 1.1 still had the Windows 2 MS-DOS executive style user interface. OS/2 1.2 was nearly another year: Oct '89. Now, it worked, it included advanced features such as the HPFS filesystem, meaning long filename support, it had a revamped and improved user interface, and the performance was OK... but also the 80386 had been out for 2 years and 386 PCs were becoming mainstream. OS/2 1.X was limited to the 286. That meant a maximum of 16 MB of RAM, that meant no ability to multitask DOS applications, and other serious limitations. The high end PC market was visibly accelerating away from the new operating system. It also had formidable hardware requirements. For example it wanted 8 MB of RAM minimum. Somewhere around the timeframe of OS/2 1.1 or OS/2 1.2 is when Microsoft realised that this project was running late, it had high hardware requirements, and yet it still couldn't fully exploit the hardware of new PCs shipping in the late 1980s, and it was becoming apparent that the future was not OS/2 after all. So it's somewhere around the 1988 to 1989 that Microsoft realised that's unless it was willing to sacrifice the PC operating system market, it needed a fallback plan, it needed some kind of alternative: something that could run on high-end mainstream commodity PCs, which means a 386 with 2 to 4 MB of RAM, that offers more compatibility with DOS, DOS device drivers, and DOS applications than OS/2. That's roughly the time that the school choir project within Microsoft started to turn into Windows 3. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, it had the new user interface from OS/2 1.2, it could support and use the new facilities of 386 chips… but it could also run in just 1 MB RAM, ran quite well in standard mode in 2 MB of RAM, and ran really well with 4 MB of RAM in 386 enhanced mode with multitasking of DOS applications. In other words, in half the RAM requirement of OS/2 1.2, they could actually do more than that operating system could do, in terms of important things that MS-DOS users actually wanted and needed. So yes in the very late 1980s, Microsoft did lie to large software vendors, promising them that OS/2 was the future, while it was working on something that would ultimately destroy OS/2. But even now I am no admirer of Microsoft, I have to admit that it was very far from a certainty that Windows 3 was going to be a hit. In the time frame that Microsoft was developing Windows 3, Word for Windows and Excel were already shipping products. Yes Lotus and WordPerfect believed the lies. Yes it's true, Lotus and WordPerfect could've targeted Windows 2, but Windows 2 was pretty terrible and was a commercial flop. So if they had targeted Windows 2 it would cost a lot of money and the products would never have made it back. Yes they made a mistake, and yes later on Microsoft encouraged them to continue investing in that mistake, knowing that there was a gamble that might make it all a huge waste of money. But what they did probably looked like the sensible prudent decision the time. And more to the point, relevant to your comment, this all occurred in the late 1980s, long before the industry went 32-bit and long before anybody even dreamed of Windows 4 which would eventually become Windows 95. That stuff happened in the 1990s, when frankly the OS/2 war was already long over.
mschaef 3y ago
> When Windows 95 was being developed, MS kept telling Lotus (and maybe Word Perfect) that OS/2 was the real future, so Microsoft's committment to OS/2 ended with Windows 3.0. But until 3.0, they themselves believed OS/2 was the (imperfect) future. Windows 3.0's ability to use protected mode on a 286 changed it all. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html > Lotus was focusing on a GUI version of their main product for OS/2. Lotus and Wordperfect both spent a lot developing for almost every platform other than Windows. It always surprised me that they never had even a fallback for Windows for their main products, given how dependent they each were on a single product.
mrguyorama 3y ago
You don't have to spread old lies to make microsoft look bad, they do just fine at being terrible on their own.
WalterBright 3y ago
Lotus was at a crossroads. They could continue with DOS, port to Windows, or port to OS/2. Which path should a cash-rich company with one product pick? All three. I have little sympathy for Lotus. They need to own their decisions. Blaming their competitor for misdirection is eye rolling.

by jmclnx 3y ago

jojobas 3y ago

GUI Excel 2.2 was released for Windows 2.0 in 1989, 3 major releases before Office for Windows 95. Essentially same for Word. WordPerfect had a perfectly working GUI version for Windows by 1994, it just couldn't compete with Word. Same for Lotus123, they were out of fashion long before Windows 95.

mike_hearn 3y ago

I used to work on Wine and don't recall encountering any APIs that made things magically faster. That was a popular rumour on Slashdot in the early 2000s because at the time, most devs were unaware of how IE could start so much faster than Mozilla, and how MS Office could start so much faster than OpenOffice. Cheating via pre-loading was assumed. It was eventually proven that this couldn't be the case when these apps started faster than their competitors even on Wine on Linux. The actual cause was that MS cared about and heavily optimized startup time. No magic. The OS/2 history isn't quite how I remember it. The fact there'd be a new version of Windows surprised nobody. Chicago development wasn't exactly a secret that caught anyone unawares. Also OS/2 Warp came out before Windows 95 did.

jve 3y ago
So much stuff thrown within this submission comments. One can wonder how much of this is misinformation, because someone once said something and the other one echoes it back...
amiga386 3y ago
No offense, but I don't think you looked too hard. There are lots of calls that could be used to do things in a more performant way, or to make things possible that were not possible using documented APIs. [0] Generally speaking though, what you say is true. There are certainly no "magically faster" API calls. There are thousands of undocumented calls that, if you were aligned with the internal team at Microsoft that wrote them, allowed you to write better performing code than if you were a third party. And as a major developer inside Microsoft, you had the power to get API calls created for your needs, while third parties didn't. That is the crux of the matter. Here's one straight from the site we're discussing today, the IOwnerDataCallback interface [0] makes it possible to do grouping on a virtual ListView. Windows Explorer uses it to great effect, everyone else can't use it. [2] [0] http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ [1] https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/comctl32/controls/listview/interfaces/iownerdatacallback.htm https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/comctl32... [2] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35197/Undocumented-List-View-Features https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/35197/Undocumented-List...
- mschaef 3y ago
  > No offense, but I don't think you looked too hard. There are lots of calls that could be used to do things in a more performant way, Undocumented API calls were rumored to be a big deal even back in the Windows 3.x days. I remember reading through this at the time looking for the 'smoking gun'. https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Microsoft-Programming/dp/0201608340 https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micr... There were some cute and offensive names, and a few interesting details about the internal implementation of Windows, but nothing that would've been hugely beneficial. Things might well have changed since then. (Both at Microsoft and at Apple, where their software is definitely allowed to do things that third party software is not.)
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Of course there are internal APIs, every OS has those. I don't know of any that would make the difference between an app being competitive and not, certainly not in that timeframe. Grouping on a virtual list view was added in Vista which is after I stopped working on Wine, but again, that is hardly the sort of thing that makes or breaks apps. Most competing office suites and browsers don't even use comctl32 at all, preferring to roll their own widgets for portability reasons. The reasons IE and Office were so fast to start was due entirely to heavy optimization. In particular Microsoft were very good at doing profile guided re-ordering of code pages to minimize HDD head movements, which was critical in an era when hard disks were the only storage medium and also much slower. The Linux toolchains didn't have anything like that and the technique wasn't even well known outside of Microsoft back then, so to GNU hackers the results appeared to be almost magic. OpenOffice or Mozilla would take like 30 seconds to start and Word/IE could start in 3. So what thousands of calls are you thinking of? To give MS such a huge competitive advantage that other companies get wiped out they'd need to have done stuff like kept a new DirectX back only for themselves. Back then they didn't even have the technology to do that. Even your link where you say people "can't do that" is about how to use that private API you named. Blocking that sort of thing requires pervasive code signing, package identity and for that to be propagated robustly through IPC. Even today Windows is kinda ropey in that regard (vs macOS/iOS where robustly enforced Apple only APIs are widespread and critical, e.g. mmap +x is an Apple-private API on macOS).

skissane 3y ago

> When Windows 95 was being developed, MS kept telling Lotus (and maybe Word Perfect) that OS/2 was the real future, so Lotus was focusing on a GUI version of their main product for OS/2. And Notes was originally developed on OS/2. This story doesn’t make sense to me. IBM and Microsoft’s falling out was public knowledge by July 1991 - there was an article about it in the New York Times. [0] Windows 95 wasn’t released until July/August 1995 - 4 years later. Everyone who was paying attention knew by mid-1991 that Microsoft’s future was Windows not OS/2. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/business/microsoft-widens-its-split-with-ibm-over-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/business/microsoft-widens...

lproven 3y ago

You have the timeline all messed up. Excel and Word both ran on Windows 2.0 (released Dec 1987). I supported Excel on Windows 2 in production. In the late 1980s, yes, Microsoft and IBM told the industry that OS/2 was the future, because they both thought it was. OS/2 1.0 was released the same month as Win 2.0) had no GUI, because it wasn't ready. OS/2 1.1 had in, released nearly a year later in Nov '88. This was what Lotus and others needed. 1.1 was not good and barely worked. For example, OS/2 1.1 still had the Windows 2 MS-DOS executive style user interface. OS/2 1.2 was nearly another year: Oct '89. Now, it worked, it included advanced features such as the HPFS filesystem, meaning long filename support, it had a revamped and improved user interface, and the performance was OK... but also the 80386 had been out for 2 years and 386 PCs were becoming mainstream. OS/2 1.X was limited to the 286. That meant a maximum of 16 MB of RAM, that meant no ability to multitask DOS applications, and other serious limitations. The high end PC market was visibly accelerating away from the new operating system. It also had formidable hardware requirements. For example it wanted 8 MB of RAM minimum. Somewhere around the timeframe of OS/2 1.1 or OS/2 1.2 is when Microsoft realised that this project was running late, it had high hardware requirements, and yet it still couldn't fully exploit the hardware of new PCs shipping in the late 1980s, and it was becoming apparent that the future was not OS/2 after all. So it's somewhere around the 1988 to 1989 that Microsoft realised that's unless it was willing to sacrifice the PC operating system market, it needed a fallback plan, it needed some kind of alternative: something that could run on high-end mainstream commodity PCs, which means a 386 with 2 to 4 MB of RAM, that offers more compatibility with DOS, DOS device drivers, and DOS applications than OS/2. That's roughly the time that the school choir project within Microsoft started to turn into Windows 3. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, it had the new user interface from OS/2 1.2, it could support and use the new facilities of 386 chips… but it could also run in just 1 MB RAM, ran quite well in standard mode in 2 MB of RAM, and ran really well with 4 MB of RAM in 386 enhanced mode with multitasking of DOS applications. In other words, in half the RAM requirement of OS/2 1.2, they could actually do more than that operating system could do, in terms of important things that MS-DOS users actually wanted and needed. So yes in the very late 1980s, Microsoft did lie to large software vendors, promising them that OS/2 was the future, while it was working on something that would ultimately destroy OS/2. But even now I am no admirer of Microsoft, I have to admit that it was very far from a certainty that Windows 3 was going to be a hit. In the time frame that Microsoft was developing Windows 3, Word for Windows and Excel were already shipping products. Yes Lotus and WordPerfect believed the lies. Yes it's true, Lotus and WordPerfect could've targeted Windows 2, but Windows 2 was pretty terrible and was a commercial flop. So if they had targeted Windows 2 it would cost a lot of money and the products would never have made it back. Yes they made a mistake, and yes later on Microsoft encouraged them to continue investing in that mistake, knowing that there was a gamble that might make it all a huge waste of money. But what they did probably looked like the sensible prudent decision the time. And more to the point, relevant to your comment, this all occurred in the late 1980s, long before the industry went 32-bit and long before anybody even dreamed of Windows 4 which would eventually become Windows 95. That stuff happened in the 1990s, when frankly the OS/2 war was already long over.

mschaef 3y ago

> When Windows 95 was being developed, MS kept telling Lotus (and maybe Word Perfect) that OS/2 was the real future, so Microsoft's committment to OS/2 ended with Windows 3.0. But until 3.0, they themselves believed OS/2 was the (imperfect) future. Windows 3.0's ability to use protected mode on a 286 changed it all. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/davidweise.html > Lotus was focusing on a GUI version of their main product for OS/2. Lotus and Wordperfect both spent a lot developing for almost every platform other than Windows. It always surprised me that they never had even a fallback for Windows for their main products, given how dependent they each were on a single product.

mrguyorama 3y ago

You don't have to spread old lies to make microsoft look bad, they do just fine at being terrible on their own.

WalterBright 3y ago

Lotus was at a crossroads. They could continue with DOS, port to Windows, or port to OS/2. Which path should a cash-rich company with one product pick? All three. I have little sympathy for Lotus. They need to own their decisions. Blaming their competitor for misdirection is eye rolling.