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Re: that last quote, I'm not sure they could have done a better job of copying the Macintosh at the time, except in a very crude way. Microsoft was targeting 1
by TillE 3y ago
Re: that last quote, I'm not sure they could have done a better job of copying the Macintosh at the time, except in a very crude way.
Microsoft was targeting 16-bit Intel CPUs which required a coprocessor for floating point support. That's a huge constraint on what you can practically do, compared to the Mac's 68k.
Hardware is probably the biggest reason Windows was garbage until Windows 95, where they jumped ahead of Mac OS with preemptive multitasking etc.
- Narishma 3y agoThe early Macs didn't have floating point support either, not even as a co-processor until the Mac II in the late 80s I think.
- desiarnezjr 3y agoNeither did Amiga. Also OS/2 was performant on equivalent hardware at the time.
- woleium 3y agoOS/2 was great! Most of the dev team went on to write Windows NT.
- mnd999 3y agoThe Amiga did have superior custom graphics chips (I guess a GPU in today's language, although entirely 2D focused) which helped a lot.
- bitwize 3y agoThe Atari ST lacked a blitter, but also had a GUI environment less miserable than Windows 2.0. Industry pundits called it the "Jackintosh", as it was Jack Tramiel's budget answer to the Macintosh.
- Narishma 3y agoOS/2 required much more resources than Windows 2, which is what we're talking about here.
- firecall 3y agoAs a Mac person that also used Windows NT in my day to day work, I never liked Windows 95. From a purely subjective perspective the design wasnt to my taste. But the worst thing was the Viruses! Windows 95 was a hellscape of security issues. It felt like I never encountered a Windows 95 box that actually worked like it was supposed to. And it seemed like everyone was always reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again. In the late 90s I had an NT4 box that I never had to reboot. My Mac was getting rebooted multiple times a day.
- ronsor 3y ago> reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again Even today, reinstalling Windows is often the only way to get it working again.
- pengaru 3y agoI worked as a lowly PC technician assembling machines from components for a little shop in a strip mall when Windows 95 was what everyone wanted. The OS was indeed a hot mess, but one thing was abundantly clear after assembling and installing it on hundreds of new machines: driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster. Linux may not have had much in the way of hardware support, but what hardware it did support tended to work pretty well. This was a huge difference vs. Win95, where all hardware ostensibly came with drivers for the OS, sort of a classic quality vs. quantity situation.
- kiwijamo 3y agoThat would explain why my experience with Win95 was so good. I never really understood all the hate for it (especially given 98/98SE/ME/XP, which came after 95, all of which I never really liked due to the all the extra "user friendly" features I never really used). I must have been lucky to have had the 'right' hardware with the better drivers at the time. IIRC I stayed on Windows 95 right up until Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time) finally dropped support for Windows 95.
- fidotron 3y agoImplementing 2D graphics operations with fixed point arithmetic isn't hard, and has the benefit of being absolutely exactly reproducible on 1980s hardware (hence why TeX uses it). You can do very sophisticated work entirely with fixed point (such as the first Playstation), and I suspect we're going to see more noise from the ML people about using it for silicon space efficiency reasons.
- acdha 3y agoGeoWorks Ensemble ran much better on the same hardware. If you wanted closer to a Mac experience it was a much better choice … except that anti-competitive licensing deals made it more expensive because most systems came with Microsoft licenses whether or not you intended to use them.
- dphidt 3y ago+1 for GeoWorks which ran a lovely suite of bundled programs amazingly well on a 286, and was preinstalled alongside MS-DOS on some systems in the early 90s. Despite being a quality product, apparently development was a major pain (expensive documentation and bad workflow), while Windows rode a wave of third party software to market domination. An interesting footnote to the Windows story of the era, and a cautionary tale perhaps. But FWIW I still run Ensemble in a VM :).
- coldacid 3y agoA stupidly overpriced SDK didn't help much either.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoDigital Research's GEM was able to do a better job than early Windows of getting the Lisa/Mac UI style/paradigm on PC hardware. So much so that Apple sued them. And they got to market sooner than Microsoft. Though their original target wasn't a Mac clone, it borrowed Mac UI elements. Lee Jay Lorenzen left Xerox and joined DR because he couldn't sell Xerox on the idea of getting Xerox Star functionality onto commodity 8080/8086 class machines. Another early one was VisiOn, from the VisiCalc folks, which had a very nice (for the time) minimalistic look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On
- fortran77 3y ago[flagged]
- a-dub 3y agoi'm trying to remember what 80286 era dos/windows PC applications actually made use of the optional FPU and find myself coming up blank. maybe autocad?
- dm319 3y agoAnd Workbench was there with pre-emptive multi-tasking, resizable overlapping windows with adjustable colours in the same year that Windows 1 was released. Makes me wonder what went wrong for them.
- hulitu 3y ago> Makes me wonder what went wrong for them. It didn't came preinstalled on the PC ? "For free" ? /s
- pjc50 3y agoThe key was not so much the FPU, but the MMU, and the availability of the various modes of the 386 processor.