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How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
- JojoFatsani 11mo agoReally wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
- hulitu 10mo ago> and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel It won't compile.
- bombcar 10mo agoProbably the 10 extra bits.
- saghm 10mo agoThe extra 84 win have to go somewhere
- kachapopopow 10mo ago11 more and it will run on win95 again.
- Findecanor 10mo agoOnly two more to go for the LLM to hallucinate x64-86 into existence.
- londons_explore 10mo agoDid you try it? I can't immediately see why explorer.exe wouldn't run and give you a start menu
- isodev 10mo agoYes, that would be glorious. Could be the XP UI too… have some more flexibility around themes.
- delta_p_delta_x 10mo agoYou still can. Run any program in compatibility mode; the Windows 2000 boxy UI is still there. As is the Windows Vista Aero Basic theme. Like I always say, the user-mode of Windows is easiest to change, that's why it has been done almost every version.
- BruceEel 10mo agoYes please! Speaking of which, was it Window Blinds(?) that could back/forward port UI themes across various Windows versions? Are they still around?
- speed_spread 10mo agoI prefer to believe they just merged the two branches in SourceSafe.
- plorkyeran 10mo agoMicrosoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.
- Traubenfuchs 10mo agoPersonally, I enjoyed MS source safe and exclusive file locking.
- sksrbWgbfK 10mo agoI loved SourceSafe for the disappearing files, and the usual "John locked the file and he went on holidays."
- Traubenfuchs 10mo agoWell that was just bad manners and you could force unlock.
- 10mo ago
- userbinator 10mo agomoving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge. The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
- sho_hn 10mo agoWow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
- AlecSchueler 10mo agoTime started moving faster after smartphones began to steal our reflective moments.
- darkwater 10mo agoI don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)
- sho_hn 10mo agoProbably a mix of this, and also that it feels like there have been many strikingly different milestones for Windows as a product since Win95, while git is not fundamentally different since 2006/07, or at least change has been far more gradual. Windows is so storied it feels older.
- torben-friis 10mo agoThere’s been two main massive shifts that create before-and-after feelings in tech. One is going from “the computer is that super-typewriter that can send mail” to internet culture, and the second is going from online in pcs to always online in smartphones. Win 95 feels from era1, xp and git was already in era 2. Once those two changes were done by 2010 though, there’s been no game changer, if anything we've regressed through shittyfication (we seem to have fewer social networks vs the original Facebook for example, as most of them turned single player feed consumption). Maybe pre and post LLMs will feel like an era change in a decade as well?
- huflungdung 10mo ago[dead]
- nolok 10mo agoIt's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up. Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it". My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mavhc 10mo agoIn Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box: ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit) Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory
- netsharc 10mo agoI wonder if the Add Fonts dialog survived to Windows 10: https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-in-windows-7/ https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-i... - during the time Microsoft had 2 designs for settings/control panels, making the OS look like a mess coded by drunks... Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.
- ale42 10mo agoWell, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.
- 10mo ago
- apexalpha 10mo agoWindows is like real life archeology. You can dig up the UI of ancient generations of humans before you underneath the modern facade.
- TMWNN 10mo agoVernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/> (Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
- mbac32768 10mo agoironically, that link 404s...
- TMWNN 10mo agoHah, so it is! Sorry about that. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>
- jodrellblank 10mo ago> "in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it" This is how I think about music and Spotify. Pretty much all music exists, you 'just' have to remember everything that exists and what it's called so you can find it. Recent HN link, Red Alert 2 in your web browser. A game from 25 years ago which you can unofficially download the C++ original version from the Internet Archive to upload to the website which extracts the assets to play in a Javascript based reimplementation inside a web hypertext document browser. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853
- Lammy 10mo agoExtant versions of the work-in-progress Shell Technology Preview “NewShell” on NT 3.51, with screenshots: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Shell_Technology_Preview https://betawiki.net/wiki/Shell_Technology_Preview
- robmccoll 10mo agoWhat's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified. Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=102823 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other article seems to imply Windows 95 used UTF16 (or UCS2, but either way 16-bit chars) so I'm confused about porting code being a problem. Was it that the APIs in 95 were still kind of a halfway point?
- ynik 10mo agoWindows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet". By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.
- usrnm 10mo ago> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.
- jasode 10mo ago>, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993. Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.
- drob518 10mo agoAs much as the tech industry loves to hate on Microsoft, it’s really quite amazing what they were able to do with fairly primitive tools operating on huge, complex code bases.
- chris_wot 10mo agoAmazingly, explorer.exe still freezes up to this very day. Bravo, Microsoft. Never change.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago@dang: It would be nice if we can add an exception to these URLs. Currently, the domain hint only says: "microsoft.com". It would be better if it said: "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" or "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". I think we did something similar with forbes.com to illuminate when it was a blog (which are frequently low quality), instead of the official media website.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- breakingcups 10mo agoIt says devblogs.microsoft.com for me
- dang 10mo agoWork in progress :) Edit: should be done now
- dang 10mo agoOk, that should be done now. I'm not happy about how much screen space "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" takes up, so I might look into rewriting these to "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". On the other hand, that's arguably a bit misleading too.
- bni 10mo agoI would like to read the story of why the Windows 95 window title bar and buttons looks so much like the NeXT ones