4 ms·

Amazing that they wrote this wonderful, detailed rant without mentioning Windows at all. VMS was certainly not the most popular OS or even most popular non-UNIX

Amazing that they wrote this wonderful, detailed rant without mentioning Windows at all. VMS was certainly not the most popular OS or even most popular non-UNIX OS. I mean, this is 1993 and they did mention DOS. But reading this, you would not know that most of those DOS machines were running Windows and that they were far, far more numerous than either UNIX or VMS. And Windows NT was already released when that was written. Not that I am a Microsoft apologist. My main machine was OS/2 back then, I was already using Linux, and ( if I had the money ) NeXTstep would have been my dream platform.

retrac 2y ago
> reading this, you would not know that most of those DOS machines were running Windows and that they were far, far more numerous Why not include the microcontroller in microwaves, too? Because those aren't real computers. (All in good fun! I don't endorse such an opinion, but it would have been common among both VMS and Unix users at the time. After all those PC OSes don't even have networking or preemptive multitasking.)
fsckboy 2y ago
you see the email addresses in the document? in 1993, not many Microsoft Windows users had email addresses. It was prehistoric times for them, and their histories were not saved. Nobody knew what the Who's down in Whoville were doing.
- bcoates 2y ago
  Lots of windows users were on the Internet or otherwise online, but the form it would take was pulling up ProComm and dialing into an isp, fidonet bbs, compuserve, etc. You didn't need to have a local TCP stack running to use email, ftp, etc. You'd just have a shell account somewhere and/or use dedicated dialup tools
floren 2y ago
The first version of NT was released July 27, 1993. This document was published August 1, 1993. What valuable first-hand programming-on-NT information would you liked them to have included about an OS that had been available for 4 days?
- cenamus 2y ago
  Well Windows existed before NT didn't it? Don't know how much people cared for it though at that point
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    Windows 3.1 provided no services which would have been relevant to MUD development. It didn't even have a networking stack - Trumpet Winsock was a third-party addon, and wasn't compatible with Berkeley sockets.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Windows 3.0 was the first that really mattered, and you needed at least an expensive 386SX to run it. A 286 could do it as well, but then you wouldn't be able to use the new enhanced mode. The large majority of folks were still running straight MS-DOS. Also the games industry only adopted Windows after Windows 95, very few titles cared about WinG on Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / Win32s.
    - skissane 2y ago
      > The large majority of folks were still running straight MS-DOS. My recollection is by 1994, Windows 3.1 was everywhere. My school had literally dozens of computers running it. It was on every PC at my father’s work. We had several computers in our house and they all ran it except the 286 we used to play games (which my dad ended up giving to his brother, since it was a big upgrade to the 8086 he’d been using to run WordStar) At home we didn’t run Windows 3.1 full-time, we’d exit to DOS to play games. But we’d use Microsoft Word to write assignments for school. I dual-booted into OS/2 2.0 because I was really into computers. Nobody else in the house knew what to do with it, and I didn’t know anyone else who ran it. After a while OS/2 got replaced by Slackware, and nobody else knew what to do with that either.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        I imagine, US economy. My school had mostly MS-DOS 5.0 computers, the UNIX class was taught by bringing a PC tower with Xenix, where the class would take 15 m turns after preparing their samples on MS-DOS with Turbo C 2.0, and it was a model school. In 1992 I did my typing exam using MS-DOS 3.3, on edlin. The other school down the block was still using Amstrad PC1512, with CGA and EGA monitors. Most of us had Ataris and Amigas at home, if families were rich enough, otherwise we had to still make do with our C64 and Spectrum variants.
pjmlp 2y ago
In 1993, not really. Not everyone was into Windows 3.x.
duskwuff 2y ago
> And Windows NT was already released when that was written. Windows NT 3.1 was released on July 27th; this document was dated August 1st. Basically nobody had a copy yet; even if they did, MERC wouldn't have run on it without substantial porting effort, as it depended on Berkeley sockets.
uint8_t 2y ago
Diku and most (all?) other MUDs were "BSD" socket-based. Windows did not even ship with a sockets layer (winsock) until 1994, with Windows NT 3.5, and it made its way to consumers with Windows 95. Merc did allow for compiling on Mac and MS-DOS, but in this mode reads and writes to the console, without a socket implementation. No multiplayer. See: https://github.com/alexmchale/merc-mud/blob/master/src/comm.c https://github.com/alexmchale/merc-mud/blob/master/src/comm....
- skissane 2y ago
  > Windows did not even ship with a sockets layer (winsock) until 1994, with Windows NT 3.5, and it made its way to consumers with Windows 95. A lot of people used third party Winsock implementations, e.g. Trumpet Winsock, under Windows 3.1. As a 1990s teenager I remember seeing it a lot. Even into the second half of the 1990s, because it wasn’t like all Windows 3.1 machines were upgraded as soon as Windows 95 came out.
ok123456 2y ago
Windows programming was not very accessible in 1993, and it was especially not very accessible for network programming. Making a Win16 application that was non-trivial and didn't crash spectacularly was wizardry. Network PC games of this era were written using DOS extenders and IPX networking.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  what about Visual Basic?
  - ok123456 2y ago
    While VB3 applications wouldn't crash, they were pretty limited and didn't look and feel like full Win16 applications. The requirement for vbrun300.dll was a sign that something was not going to be good. In 1993, there weren't many third-party controls. Any networking was accomplished through FFI.
codesnik 2y ago
MUDs are played over network or on a multiuser mainframe, in realtime. DOS (and windows) machines back then were single user and networks for them were rare, specialized and/or asynchronous, like BBS.
Isamu 2y ago
I tried running a server on regular Windows back then, it was too unreliable, constant hanging requiring reboot. Later I tried Windows NT for a server and it was on such a different level, no comparison. It worked like real operating systems should.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  NT4 released in '96. SP4 a couple years later made it really stable.
bcoates 2y ago
32-bit C programming on wintel systems in that era would have looked like using DOS extender/DPMI and would have been lumped under "MS-DOS" even if you were assuming the user was running Windows. (Even if your IDE was a Windows GUI program)
derefr 2y ago
For quite a while after Windows already became popular, any program that did networking on IBM PCs still had to be an MS-DOS program. In 1993, (regular, consumer) Windows didn't really "support" networking; (limited) OS support for networking was something only available in Windows For Workgroups, which itself was something you'd only expect to find installed in offices, not on the kind of home PC owned by someone dialing into a MUD. I believe that you could run these networked programs in a Windows 3.1 OS DOS virtual machine, so you didn't have to reboot fully into DOS just to run them. But it makes sense, from the perspective of an author of networked software at the time, to think of IBM PCs as being "MS DOS machines." That's the abstraction the developer had to work against for that port of the software.
em-bee 2y ago
hah, when my grandmother wished to get a computer (she was a volunteer secretary in a few organizations doing a lot of typing on a mechanical typewriter until then) grandpa sent me out to get it, and i chose some decent machine for the time and put OS/2 on it (and LaTeX). meanwhile i had linux on my own machine, and when the opportunity arose i used my student status to buy a discounted copy of OpenStep for the PC. a few years later i got my hands on a NeXT cube and a few slabs from a university auctioning off old equipment ;-)

retrac 2y ago

> reading this, you would not know that most of those DOS machines were running Windows and that they were far, far more numerous Why not include the microcontroller in microwaves, too? Because those aren't real computers. (All in good fun! I don't endorse such an opinion, but it would have been common among both VMS and Unix users at the time. After all those PC OSes don't even have networking or preemptive multitasking.)

fsckboy 2y ago

you see the email addresses in the document? in 1993, not many Microsoft Windows users had email addresses. It was prehistoric times for them, and their histories were not saved. Nobody knew what the Who's down in Whoville were doing.

bcoates 2y ago
Lots of windows users were on the Internet or otherwise online, but the form it would take was pulling up ProComm and dialing into an isp, fidonet bbs, compuserve, etc. You didn't need to have a local TCP stack running to use email, ftp, etc. You'd just have a shell account somewhere and/or use dedicated dialup tools

floren 2y ago

The first version of NT was released July 27, 1993. This document was published August 1, 1993. What valuable first-hand programming-on-NT information would you liked them to have included about an OS that had been available for 4 days?

cenamus 2y ago
Well Windows existed before NT didn't it? Don't know how much people cared for it though at that point
- duskwuff 2y ago
  Windows 3.1 provided no services which would have been relevant to MUD development. It didn't even have a networking stack - Trumpet Winsock was a third-party addon, and wasn't compatible with Berkeley sockets.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Windows 3.0 was the first that really mattered, and you needed at least an expensive 386SX to run it. A 286 could do it as well, but then you wouldn't be able to use the new enhanced mode. The large majority of folks were still running straight MS-DOS. Also the games industry only adopted Windows after Windows 95, very few titles cared about WinG on Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / Win32s.
  - skissane 2y ago
    > The large majority of folks were still running straight MS-DOS. My recollection is by 1994, Windows 3.1 was everywhere. My school had literally dozens of computers running it. It was on every PC at my father’s work. We had several computers in our house and they all ran it except the 286 we used to play games (which my dad ended up giving to his brother, since it was a big upgrade to the 8086 he’d been using to run WordStar) At home we didn’t run Windows 3.1 full-time, we’d exit to DOS to play games. But we’d use Microsoft Word to write assignments for school. I dual-booted into OS/2 2.0 because I was really into computers. Nobody else in the house knew what to do with it, and I didn’t know anyone else who ran it. After a while OS/2 got replaced by Slackware, and nobody else knew what to do with that either.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I imagine, US economy. My school had mostly MS-DOS 5.0 computers, the UNIX class was taught by bringing a PC tower with Xenix, where the class would take 15 m turns after preparing their samples on MS-DOS with Turbo C 2.0, and it was a model school. In 1992 I did my typing exam using MS-DOS 3.3, on edlin. The other school down the block was still using Amstrad PC1512, with CGA and EGA monitors. Most of us had Ataris and Amigas at home, if families were rich enough, otherwise we had to still make do with our C64 and Spectrum variants.

pjmlp 2y ago

In 1993, not really. Not everyone was into Windows 3.x.

duskwuff 2y ago

> And Windows NT was already released when that was written. Windows NT 3.1 was released on July 27th; this document was dated August 1st. Basically nobody had a copy yet; even if they did, MERC wouldn't have run on it without substantial porting effort, as it depended on Berkeley sockets.

uint8_t 2y ago

Diku and most (all?) other MUDs were "BSD" socket-based. Windows did not even ship with a sockets layer (winsock) until 1994, with Windows NT 3.5, and it made its way to consumers with Windows 95. Merc did allow for compiling on Mac and MS-DOS, but in this mode reads and writes to the console, without a socket implementation. No multiplayer. See: https://github.com/alexmchale/merc-mud/blob/master/src/comm.c https://github.com/alexmchale/merc-mud/blob/master/src/comm....

skissane 2y ago
> Windows did not even ship with a sockets layer (winsock) until 1994, with Windows NT 3.5, and it made its way to consumers with Windows 95. A lot of people used third party Winsock implementations, e.g. Trumpet Winsock, under Windows 3.1. As a 1990s teenager I remember seeing it a lot. Even into the second half of the 1990s, because it wasn’t like all Windows 3.1 machines were upgraded as soon as Windows 95 came out.

ok123456 2y ago

Windows programming was not very accessible in 1993, and it was especially not very accessible for network programming. Making a Win16 application that was non-trivial and didn't crash spectacularly was wizardry. Network PC games of this era were written using DOS extenders and IPX networking.

jjtheblunt 2y ago
what about Visual Basic?
- ok123456 2y ago
  While VB3 applications wouldn't crash, they were pretty limited and didn't look and feel like full Win16 applications. The requirement for vbrun300.dll was a sign that something was not going to be good. In 1993, there weren't many third-party controls. Any networking was accomplished through FFI.

codesnik 2y ago

MUDs are played over network or on a multiuser mainframe, in realtime. DOS (and windows) machines back then were single user and networks for them were rare, specialized and/or asynchronous, like BBS.

Isamu 2y ago

I tried running a server on regular Windows back then, it was too unreliable, constant hanging requiring reboot. Later I tried Windows NT for a server and it was on such a different level, no comparison. It worked like real operating systems should.

drewcoo 2y ago
NT4 released in '96. SP4 a couple years later made it really stable.

bcoates 2y ago

32-bit C programming on wintel systems in that era would have looked like using DOS extender/DPMI and would have been lumped under "MS-DOS" even if you were assuming the user was running Windows. (Even if your IDE was a Windows GUI program)

derefr 2y ago

For quite a while after Windows already became popular, any program that did networking on IBM PCs still had to be an MS-DOS program. In 1993, (regular, consumer) Windows didn't really "support" networking; (limited) OS support for networking was something only available in Windows For Workgroups, which itself was something you'd only expect to find installed in offices, not on the kind of home PC owned by someone dialing into a MUD. I believe that you could run these networked programs in a Windows 3.1 OS DOS virtual machine, so you didn't have to reboot fully into DOS just to run them. But it makes sense, from the perspective of an author of networked software at the time, to think of IBM PCs as being "MS DOS machines." That's the abstraction the developer had to work against for that port of the software.

em-bee 2y ago

hah, when my grandmother wished to get a computer (she was a volunteer secretary in a few organizations doing a lot of typing on a mechanical typewriter until then) grandpa sent me out to get it, and i chose some decent machine for the time and put OS/2 on it (and LaTeX). meanwhile i had linux on my own machine, and when the opportunity arose i used my student status to buy a discounted copy of OpenStep for the PC. a few years later i got my hands on a NeXT cube and a few slabs from a university auctioning off old equipment ;-)