3 ms·

(author) Front end or back end? Anything interesting about its operation or the protocols?

• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Front end. I was a Mac programmer. It was basically AOL. I am pretty sure that AppleLink became the basis for the first AOL clients (or vice-versa). We had the exact same "You've Got Mail!" sound, and a lot of the same graphic assets. My claim to fame, was disassembling Finder, to nail a mistake in Apple documentation. Back then, processes could communicate directly with each other. Security folks would absolutely defecate masonry, if they saw what it was like. The issue was that we used Pascal strings, and one of the structures that was used to share information between processes, had a Pascal string (one-byte length, followed by up to 255 bytes of ASCII string). Their docs said it was optimized (no padding beyond word), so a 2-character string would take 4 bytes (1 length, 2 string, 1 pad). In fact, they always reserved the entire 256 bytes, and ignored the bytes beyond the end of the string. I had to actually disassemble Finder, to figure that out. This is neither here, nor there, but GEIS was the most dysfunctional organization I ever worked for. In the 18 months I worked for them, they had 3 reorgs.
  • pcdoodle 3y ago
    Wow, cool to hear stories like this.