6 ms·

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

51 points by CppPro 2y ago

CppPro 2y ago
While he gave a nod to the Windows 95 design team for the iconic interface element, he explained how he'd worked out a way of avoiding a library of localized bitmaps by figuring out how to display sideways text. In an email to The Register, Plummer told us: "Long story short, in the production builds, I've learned they went with bitmaps rather than the programmatic version. "My guess is that's the way the art team had always delivered them ... and so it was just easier, but I don't have any real idea. I stay away from source code leaks so don't want to investigate the technicals!"
chasingentropy 2y ago
Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
  - m4ttm 2y ago
    In a photo editor and use bitmaps
  - winrid 2y ago
    Seems like a localization nightmare though. :)
  - z3t4 2y ago
    then you have to deal with cache invalidation, you need to have triggers in all places that change the look of the menu, for example when you install a new program, change the OS language, etc.
    - fredoralive 2y ago
      This is talking about the Windows NT Workstation (or Windows 95 etc.) banner on the left of the original start menu. It doesn’t change when you add programs, and I don’t think the edition branding changes between languages (at least the French versions are still Windows NT Workstation / Server, and if the French didn’t force Microsoft to localise the edition names, I doubt any else would manage). So you could just render once on startup / first menu draw then cache the bitmap. Or just prerender the bitmap as a graphical resource and store it on disc…
- blkhawk 2y ago
  the rotation would only happened once and would then have been written to the device context. once its in a DC you can manipulate it with memcpy. A device context is a pointer to the window "surface" and maps a memory area. I write this from memory so its possible that i misremember :)
Kwpolska 2y ago
This claim was so easy to verify with a Windows NT 4 ISO and a resource editor, but nobody did. And nobody thought the bitmap has much better font rendering than NT 4. Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8
- bilekas 2y ago
  Not sure why it's related what he did after leaving Microsoft but okay, the article clearly states that he said the were using it internally at least and doesn't know why the programmatic sideways text was taken out but that everything else he touched on was right. It seems you have an opinion on Dave and that's fine but unrelated to the article here.
  - bc_programming 2y ago
    It's related because that past suggests a history of being untrustworthy. I mean we're talking about running a company that literally stole money from people and intentionally infected peoples computers to try to trick them into giving you more money, not just something he did by accident one weekend but something he dedicated years of his life to. Him leaning heavily on how he worked at a company two decades ago doesn't help. Other than the scam company shut down by washington state, what has he done since? As for the particular claim regarding the start menu, What he actually claimed is that his implementation was removed in production builds. However, at the same time, there's no evidence of it in any of the various Beta and release candidate versions of NT4. Not only that, but prior to the NT4 betas, it was effectively the NT 3.51 "Desktop Shell Update" and none of the releases of that have his claimed implementation. So when and where is it? He states "I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally". The issue is that there really was no "NT4 beta" at that point in time, nor any start menu in NT to add his rotated text code to. It was only around the start of 1994 that what would be known as the Taskbar and Start Menu really appeared in Chicago milestones- we know he isn't referring to those, since 9x didn't support the needed LOGFONT structures. What would become the start menu on Windows NT only appeared with the "Newshell" project which was preview software that you installed on NT 3.51 to add the Windows 95 enhanced shell. originally a desktop update for Windows NT 3.51 which started around the time of 95's release in, well, 1995. There's no evidence of his special code there- in fact the NT 3.51 Desktop Shell Update previews all used a bitmap. And you might think, ahh, hew must mean before that, but the rotation feature in question, I believe, was new to NT4 altogether- so it would presumably have appeared somewhere during the betas. The problem with his claims seems to be that evidence never seems particular forthcoming. When new information comes out he retracts claims and re-titles videos in order to move his claim into "gaps" where his claims are less falsifiable.
M95D 2y ago
WinNT task manager is not the same as Win9x. I doubt it was "ported". In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: press any key to wait or CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot" BSOD). In WinNT, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do sh|t. All apps kept running. The Task Manager was loaded from disk (when the system found the time) and run in parallel with the other apps. On a busy system, especially if it was out of memory and doing disk thrashing, or some video/media was stuck with 100% CPU on high priority, there was no chance of recovering it with the Task Manager.
- rollcat 2y ago
  Do you see any feasible way of re-fitting a modern OS with similar capability? It would likely require a lot of vertical integration between the kernel, display server, task manager, etc
  - M95D 2y ago
    Unfortunately, no. I belive it is first a conflict of policy: the USER needs to have more privileges than SYSTEM in order to suspend execution of all (including system's) processes. WinNT is a multi-user OS. Nobody would allow the user to DDoS the system, even when that user has direct access to the reset button. A second problem is that WinNT probably can't even open the Task Manager if some system processes are suspended (csrss?, lsass?). It probably works in Linux console. Sysvinit has two keyboard signals (CTRL-ALT-DEL and CTRL-UP, I think), that can run any command, exec'd directly by init with root privileges, and both are configurable in inittab. It also has the SysRq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
    - mjevans 2y ago
      I miss the magic SysRq key... Xorg / graphical systems blocked it decades ago, I've forgotten how to invoke it without looking it up, though I do remember REISUB. The security perspective of the SysRq commands is: a human is on a hard-wired console. If they want they can pull the power or press buttons on the outside of the PC that aren't on the keyboard. It's probably OK to obey some small list of actions that are useful when the rest of the system might be unresponsive.
eknkc 2y ago
I’ve seen a couple videos of Dave Plummer and they were fun. Gave some insight to internals of Windows etc. I even followed him on YT back then. But lately it feels like I see him all the time and there is something off with the guy. Can’t name what it is. Feels like he’s trying to milk whatever fame he got around the nerd circles as much as possible.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Probably trying to bury bad SEO. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8
- gosub100 2y ago
  He's got autism, which he has discussed openly on camera and I think wrote about in his book.
  - gertop 2y ago
    I don't think that's what OP was talking about. For the first year or so of his rise Dave finished each videos by "I'm only in this for the subs and likes" and had monetization turned off. Now he ends with "I'm mostly in it for the subs and likes" and has monetization turned on. He's also removed his claim that all profits from his book and channel go to autism research. Nothing wrong with making money from your work but it does show a change of focus.
- graynk 2y ago
  Every time I see his videos I think “haven’t you already made a video on this exact topic already”? Like, how many times can you make the “I made Task Manager” video, we got the idea the first time round..
casenmgreen 2y ago
Orthogonal : I have to say I really dislike the cookie permissions dialog El Reg now use. The first page is shows you with the "reject all" is only for the page of options you're on to start with - the "legitimate uses" page has a ton of stuff opted-in by default, and to turn those off, you have to click on every company, one by one. Also, once you've hit "reject all", I can find no way to get that permissions dialog back again. It's a deliberate UI approach to trick you into accepting a ton of cookies without knowing you've done so.
- MourYother 2y ago
  Wouldn't removing all cookies and local storage force the dialog back? Also, if the site needs consent to collect data, hiding the dialog with adblocker is preferable to clicking anything, no?
withinrafael 2y ago
The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8
- column 2y ago
  haters gonna hate...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  He addresses this in the pinned comment: > UPDATE: This only shipped in the NTSUR release, as far as I can now tell. I've confirmed with team members that I'm not crazy, I did write and we did ship the code I describe in this episode, but it was ultimately replaced circa NT4 with bitmaps! I don't know what's true, but it seems odd to not mention that.
  - withinrafael 2y ago
    Not sure what release he's referring to (NTSUR isn't the name of a release). But I find it interesting he decides to only do his homework after the video/discussion.
    - kenny11 2y ago
      I think that's referring to the NT "Shell Update Release" which was an early beta of the Windows 95-style start menu that you could install on Windows NT 3.51.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
  You do realize that in corporations such as Microsoft, multiple people work on the same code, and code gets rewritten all the time, right? Dave Plummer cannot know about any changes after he left the company. You seem to be not aware of that. Also I don't know about you, but I don't know shit about the code I wrote two weeks ago. How do you expect someone to remember all details about code he wrote more than 25 years ago?
ngcazz 2y ago
Some choices in software shouldn't just be delivered in hopes everyone agrees with them, and even if they do, that they'll adopt as you envisaged - design decisions like this need to be shared so people have a chance of understanding and scrutinising the patterns involved. Otherwise depending on your processes you'll either get what davepl got, or you'll be playing whack-a-mole in code reviews trying to protect your design; neither of those situations is a good use of your time.
jeroenhd 2y ago
> "[..] I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally, but it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written, and didn't use it [..]" I wonder if there are any leaked Win95 betas that can show the different approaches. I can imagine that a static bitmap would've been much faster and less memory intensive, something quite important when you're targeting computers with 8MB of RAM.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the most usable of that era (just a bit later). It was stable, solid, and had a responsive UI.
- hulitu 2y ago
  It was the first NT to have DirectX. It was the best of both worlds NT and 9x. Then the decline started.
- ngcazz 2y ago
  WinXP was mostly a cosmetic upgrade on Win2K right? AFAIR there strictly were no technical reasons why Win2K wouldn't be able to run XP software, only stuff like version checks and what not

51 points by CppPro 2y ago

While he gave a nod to the Windows 95 design team for the iconic interface element, he explained how he'd worked out a way of avoiding a library of localized bitmaps by figuring out how to display sideways text. In an email to The Register, Plummer told us: "Long story short, in the production builds, I've learned they went with bitmaps rather than the programmatic version. "My guess is that's the way the art team had always delivered them ... and so it was just easier, but I don't have any real idea. I stay away from source code leaks so don't want to investigate the technicals!"

chasingentropy 2y ago

Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.

hakfoo 2y ago
I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
- m4ttm 2y ago
  In a photo editor and use bitmaps
- winrid 2y ago
  Seems like a localization nightmare though. :)
- z3t4 2y ago
  then you have to deal with cache invalidation, you need to have triggers in all places that change the look of the menu, for example when you install a new program, change the OS language, etc.
  - fredoralive 2y ago
    This is talking about the Windows NT Workstation (or Windows 95 etc.) banner on the left of the original start menu. It doesn’t change when you add programs, and I don’t think the edition branding changes between languages (at least the French versions are still Windows NT Workstation / Server, and if the French didn’t force Microsoft to localise the edition names, I doubt any else would manage). So you could just render once on startup / first menu draw then cache the bitmap. Or just prerender the bitmap as a graphical resource and store it on disc…
blkhawk 2y ago
the rotation would only happened once and would then have been written to the device context. once its in a DC you can manipulate it with memcpy. A device context is a pointer to the window "surface" and maps a memory area. I write this from memory so its possible that i misremember :)

Kwpolska 2y ago

This claim was so easy to verify with a Windows NT 4 ISO and a resource editor, but nobody did. And nobody thought the bitmap has much better font rendering than NT 4. Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8

bilekas 2y ago
Not sure why it's related what he did after leaving Microsoft but okay, the article clearly states that he said the were using it internally at least and doesn't know why the programmatic sideways text was taken out but that everything else he touched on was right. It seems you have an opinion on Dave and that's fine but unrelated to the article here.
- bc_programming 2y ago
  It's related because that past suggests a history of being untrustworthy. I mean we're talking about running a company that literally stole money from people and intentionally infected peoples computers to try to trick them into giving you more money, not just something he did by accident one weekend but something he dedicated years of his life to. Him leaning heavily on how he worked at a company two decades ago doesn't help. Other than the scam company shut down by washington state, what has he done since? As for the particular claim regarding the start menu, What he actually claimed is that his implementation was removed in production builds. However, at the same time, there's no evidence of it in any of the various Beta and release candidate versions of NT4. Not only that, but prior to the NT4 betas, it was effectively the NT 3.51 "Desktop Shell Update" and none of the releases of that have his claimed implementation. So when and where is it? He states "I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally". The issue is that there really was no "NT4 beta" at that point in time, nor any start menu in NT to add his rotated text code to. It was only around the start of 1994 that what would be known as the Taskbar and Start Menu really appeared in Chicago milestones- we know he isn't referring to those, since 9x didn't support the needed LOGFONT structures. What would become the start menu on Windows NT only appeared with the "Newshell" project which was preview software that you installed on NT 3.51 to add the Windows 95 enhanced shell. originally a desktop update for Windows NT 3.51 which started around the time of 95's release in, well, 1995. There's no evidence of his special code there- in fact the NT 3.51 Desktop Shell Update previews all used a bitmap. And you might think, ahh, hew must mean before that, but the rotation feature in question, I believe, was new to NT4 altogether- so it would presumably have appeared somewhere during the betas. The problem with his claims seems to be that evidence never seems particular forthcoming. When new information comes out he retracts claims and re-titles videos in order to move his claim into "gaps" where his claims are less falsifiable.

M95D 2y ago

WinNT task manager is not the same as Win9x. I doubt it was "ported". In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: press any key to wait or CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot" BSOD). In WinNT, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do sh|t. All apps kept running. The Task Manager was loaded from disk (when the system found the time) and run in parallel with the other apps. On a busy system, especially if it was out of memory and doing disk thrashing, or some video/media was stuck with 100% CPU on high priority, there was no chance of recovering it with the Task Manager.

rollcat 2y ago
Do you see any feasible way of re-fitting a modern OS with similar capability? It would likely require a lot of vertical integration between the kernel, display server, task manager, etc
- M95D 2y ago
  Unfortunately, no. I belive it is first a conflict of policy: the USER needs to have more privileges than SYSTEM in order to suspend execution of all (including system's) processes. WinNT is a multi-user OS. Nobody would allow the user to DDoS the system, even when that user has direct access to the reset button. A second problem is that WinNT probably can't even open the Task Manager if some system processes are suspended (csrss?, lsass?). It probably works in Linux console. Sysvinit has two keyboard signals (CTRL-ALT-DEL and CTRL-UP, I think), that can run any command, exec'd directly by init with root privileges, and both are configurable in inittab. It also has the SysRq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
  - mjevans 2y ago
    I miss the magic SysRq key... Xorg / graphical systems blocked it decades ago, I've forgotten how to invoke it without looking it up, though I do remember REISUB. The security perspective of the SysRq commands is: a human is on a hard-wired console. If they want they can pull the power or press buttons on the outside of the PC that aren't on the keyboard. It's probably OK to obey some small list of actions that are useful when the rest of the system might be unresponsive.

eknkc 2y ago

I’ve seen a couple videos of Dave Plummer and they were fun. Gave some insight to internals of Windows etc. I even followed him on YT back then. But lately it feels like I see him all the time and there is something off with the guy. Can’t name what it is. Feels like he’s trying to milk whatever fame he got around the nerd circles as much as possible.

throwaway48476 2y ago
Probably trying to bury bad SEO. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8
gosub100 2y ago
He's got autism, which he has discussed openly on camera and I think wrote about in his book.
- gertop 2y ago
  I don't think that's what OP was talking about. For the first year or so of his rise Dave finished each videos by "I'm only in this for the subs and likes" and had monetization turned off. Now he ends with "I'm mostly in it for the subs and likes" and has monetization turned on. He's also removed his claim that all profits from his book and channel go to autism research. Nothing wrong with making money from your work but it does show a change of focus.
graynk 2y ago
Every time I see his videos I think “haven’t you already made a video on this exact topic already”? Like, how many times can you make the “I made Task Manager” video, we got the idea the first time round..

casenmgreen 2y ago

Orthogonal : I have to say I really dislike the cookie permissions dialog El Reg now use. The first page is shows you with the "reject all" is only for the page of options you're on to start with - the "legitimate uses" page has a ton of stuff opted-in by default, and to turn those off, you have to click on every company, one by one. Also, once you've hit "reject all", I can find no way to get that permissions dialog back again. It's a deliberate UI approach to trick you into accepting a ton of cookies without knowing you've done so.

MourYother 2y ago
Wouldn't removing all cookies and local storage force the dialog back? Also, if the site needs consent to collect data, hiding the dialog with adblocker is preferable to clicking anything, no?

withinrafael 2y ago

The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

column 2y ago
haters gonna hate...
robertlagrant 2y ago
He addresses this in the pinned comment: > UPDATE: This only shipped in the NTSUR release, as far as I can now tell. I've confirmed with team members that I'm not crazy, I did write and we did ship the code I describe in this episode, but it was ultimately replaced circa NT4 with bitmaps! I don't know what's true, but it seems odd to not mention that.
- withinrafael 2y ago
  Not sure what release he's referring to (NTSUR isn't the name of a release). But I find it interesting he decides to only do his homework after the video/discussion.
  - kenny11 2y ago
    I think that's referring to the NT "Shell Update Release" which was an early beta of the Windows 95-style start menu that you could install on Windows NT 3.51.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
You do realize that in corporations such as Microsoft, multiple people work on the same code, and code gets rewritten all the time, right? Dave Plummer cannot know about any changes after he left the company. You seem to be not aware of that. Also I don't know about you, but I don't know shit about the code I wrote two weeks ago. How do you expect someone to remember all details about code he wrote more than 25 years ago?

ngcazz 2y ago

Some choices in software shouldn't just be delivered in hopes everyone agrees with them, and even if they do, that they'll adopt as you envisaged - design decisions like this need to be shared so people have a chance of understanding and scrutinising the patterns involved. Otherwise depending on your processes you'll either get what davepl got, or you'll be playing whack-a-mole in code reviews trying to protect your design; neither of those situations is a good use of your time.

jeroenhd 2y ago

> "[..] I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally, but it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written, and didn't use it [..]" I wonder if there are any leaked Win95 betas that can show the different approaches. I can imagine that a static bitmap would've been much faster and less memory intensive, something quite important when you're targeting computers with 8MB of RAM.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the most usable of that era (just a bit later). It was stable, solid, and had a responsive UI.

hulitu 2y ago
It was the first NT to have DirectX. It was the best of both worlds NT and 9x. Then the decline started.
ngcazz 2y ago
WinXP was mostly a cosmetic upgrade on Win2K right? AFAIR there strictly were no technical reasons why Win2K wouldn't be able to run XP software, only stuff like version checks and what not