
Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try - nikbackm
https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-5-a-second-try/
======
feb
The previous posts of this serie have been discussed on HN:

* Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351)) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724)) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844)) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926))

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megaman22
There are a few blogs that HN should just scrape their RSS feeds and put on
the front page, and this is one of that few

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
You weren't joking. Just skimmed through the rest of the blog and this is an
absolute treasure!

Good place to start for others:
[https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/](https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/)

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niftich
Excel installing a captive Windows, a technical detail they could have hid,
was instead played up to demo the windowing GUI, in a better implementation of
shareware than nearly anything that came after. This ingenious decision really
ought to be more widely known and celebrated, but seems to have fallen out of
the abbreviated narrative around Windows' (or Excel's) history, and it takes
specialized sources like this one, or books by Excel gurus [1] to talk more
about this fact.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8)

~~~
flomo
You could probably find this info in the trade press like InfoWorld, but yes,
Microsoft was essentially giving-away Windows to get it catch on. 3rd party
ISVs also used "runtime Windows", and you could get a full copy free with a MS
mouse, or Visual Basic, or etcetera. You could also give copies to all your
friends and coworkers, there was no copy-protection, and the software police
didn't mind. Didn't really catch on until Windows 3 however.

~~~
digi_owl
I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in XP
because the BSA threatened to throw them out.

Frankly MS has held that it is better, for them, that the public pirate MS
software than switch to alternatives.

Also, private usage of MS software is seem by them as a sales pitch towards
businesses. It allows MS to argue that potential employees already knows basic
operations, so there is less required training for new hires.

~~~
mwcampbell
> I seem to recall reading that MS only started doing the activation thing in
> XP because the BSA threatened to throw them out.

I don't buy it. Microsoft was so huge that I don't see why they would care
about the BSA. It seems more likely that product activation really has helped
Microsoft make more money.

~~~
bitwize
Microsoft _co-founded_ the BSA because the software piracy rent-a-cops of the
day -- the SPA -- sided with the DoJ in the antitrust suit against Microsoft.

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js2
Two thoughts.

1\. I can't get over how primitive the Windows UI was compared to Mac years
after Mac shipped. Apple began the Macintosh project in late '79 and by Jan
'84 shipped both the Mac and the OS. Microsoft began Windows development in
'81 and didn't really catch up UI-wise till Windows 3 in 1990. Meanwhile,
Apple would squander its head start, not shipping an OS as technically sound
as NT (1993) till OS X in 2000.

2\. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost
kills Microsoft going all in on OS/2\. Was Microsoft successful in spite of
him?

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ams6110
Was OS/2 tied to the PS/2 and MCA? In my first job out of school in the early
1990s, all the developers had OS/2 workstations. It was a good OS, stable,
multitasked well, and from memory Microsoft didn't really equal it until
Windows NT4 or maybe even 2000. From my perspective OS/2 didn't fail for
technical reasons, it must have been IBM trying to recapture the PC as a
proprietary platform when the market really wanted something that would run on
any PC clone.

~~~
flomo
Not strictly, but the original plan was to have Microsoft market OS/2 2.0 to
the clone makers. So when MS walked away, IBM didn't have a good story for 3rd
parties. OS/2 2 had drivers for stuff with names like "IBM 3142" and you had
to know whether that was the equivalent of an Adaptec SCSI adaptor or HP
LaserJet printer. The association with PS2/MCA certainly muted OS/2's
reception though.

~~~
yuhong
That OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of my favorite topics BTW. It ended up in the end
much worse than that.

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josteink
I never liked the PS/1 and PS/2 things IBM did.

It seemed like an obvious attempt to try to snare customers into a closed
system. I never knew however that IBM tried to snare in Microsoft too.

An interesting read for sure.

~~~
ajross
Just the PS/2.

The PS/1 arrived several years later and was an attempt by IBM to reclaim some
of the ground lost to the emerging "PC clone" architecture. It was an ISA bus
machine with IDE drives -- the opposite of the proprietary MCA stuff going on
in the PS/2's of the era (which by this point was largely regarded as a
business failure).

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kristianp
Interesting that Excel was developed first for the Mac. Excel also used p-code
[1][2] for its cross-platform abilities:

"had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore
run unmodified on Macintosh’s 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs."

It would be interesting to see the first version of excel on Mac, the windows
version in the article looks very familiar.

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-
not-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-
here-syndrome/) [2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254060)

------
tangue
Ballmer could have sink Microsoft in 1986. Didn’t knew that but makes sense.
How many long term bids are we missing in 2018 because Ballmer-like executives
are now in power ?

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dfox
I assume that some variant of "bundled Windows Runtime" is the reason why
trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first
PC had MZ stubs, that didn't print "This program requires Microsoft Windows",
but EXEC'd something like "%COMSPEC% /C WIN.COM PROGRAM.EXE"

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skookumchuck
At the time, Lotus was faced with a choice on where to go with Lotus 1-2-3:
OS/2, Windows, or text mode. They backed the wrong horse. They were a big
company at the time, could have easily bet on all three, and stayed in
business.

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keypusher
As the years go by, and new stories like this come out, I find increasingly
growing respect for Bill Gates.

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nikodunk
I love how un-apologetically "skeumorphic" this blog is. Ah, I miss the
days...

~~~
blackrock
I miss that skeumorphic design. I can't wait until this flat fad goes away.

It's like somebody hit the computer UI design world with a stupid stick. And
all the designers woke up without the ability to see in 3 dimensions, and
lived a life as Flatlanders.

Gestures are fantastic though.

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ThJ
How do you flag something as a dupe?

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merricksb
Just flag it, and make a comment pointing to the previous thread so other
users and moderators can find it easily.

If there's no previous thread (i.e., a submission of that item in the past 12
months with a significant number of votes and of on-topic comments), it's not
a dupe :)

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doppp
Odd, posted this yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576304)

~~~
beefhash
HN is notoriously fickle. The same story can get 0 upvotes, then be submitted
by someone else in a couple hours and then garner hundreds of points.

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gkya
How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it
automatically becomes an upvote. I'm generally fine with it, except when it
has 1-5 votes and will never see the front page.

HN has so many secret behaviour that it became boring by now. I don't think I
will bother posting a story again, because it's very hard to get some
discussion to happen around a post (which is the whole point of posting a link
for me), whereas in most Reddit subs, even if your post is in the -1 to 1
votes range, you can still get useful answers or interesting comments.

~~~
beefhash
> How? When I post something and it happens to be recently posted, it
> automatically becomes an upvote.

It _seems_ that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't
think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout.

As for submissions, I'd recommend trying to land in the American morning/early
European afternoon. That's when most people seem to browse and thus you have a
better chance of getting upvoted to the front page.

You may also be interested in this: [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
undocumented](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented)

~~~
gkya
I'm in Turkey which is UTC+3, and I usually submit (well I don't usually
submit, but) around noon or evening, which happen to be the moments when I
usually check my feeds and my mail for newsletters. Strategical submitting
seems too much to me, as if I was doing it for the karma points rather than
the discussion.

> It seems that sometimes, high karma accounts can submit a dupe. But I don't
> think it always works. Maybe it's a lower dupe submission check timeout.

Yeah, yet another enigmatic "natural phenomenon" of HN. I appreciate the link
you've given, but my actual point was that this sort of unknowable phenomena
discourages participation. For example some time ago the [vouch] links
disappeared for me. Some more time ago edits became impossible (2h is too
short of a time, say I write something silly, 5h later I check back, and want
to append an apology or a clarification; that's impossible, I need to reply to
myself and hope people see that before scalding me). Also can not downvote
after a day. What if I came across some misinformation that was older?
Detaching threads is awful, because your words are removed from context; why
not delete instead? Green usernames are an awful idea, most often I don't care
about the poster, and why mark people because their accounts are new? Nobody
needs that information. These sort of things prove to me that HN is not a
"community", but more of an "order". We don't get to decide anything.

------
21
There is literally not a single comment addressing the content here at this
moment :)

Yes, I'm not helping

~~~
1996
I read that yesterday and I found it interesting as an history lesson and for
the strategic insights, but I can't say I'm familiar with any of that. I
didn't even know than windows before 3.1 was really used, and not just test
versions

