
Windows 3.x looks for 3 occurrences of “CON” 59 bytes apart - userbinator
https://books.google.com/books?id=LIyy_CtozLcC&pg=PA360&lpg=PA360&focus=viewport
======
TheRealPomax
Can someone who upvoted this explain why? I'm physical having difficulty
reading the googlebooks blurry text (and zooming isn't doing enough to
mitigate that) and would love to know why this made it to the front page.

Is there maybe a copy of this text on a plain webpage anywhere that I can read
instead?

~~~
ncmncm
You are being reminded that Microsoft code was _always_ batshit insane, and
only ever just barely worked.

In the W95/98 era, they succeeded in redefining "crash" to mean, _not_ that
the program or OS stopped, requiring a restart, but rather that restarting
wouldn't work, and you would have to re-install the OS.

I still recall my shock at learning of this re-definition. I had said that
Linux (of the day) would hardly ever crash, and the person said he often went
weeks without need to re-install his OS. Crashing, in the old sense, was a
several- or many-times-a-day event, and hardly deserved mention. People
berated themselves for not having saved their work recently enough. Sometimes
they complained of bluescreens while saving, and would alternate saving to two
different files, so one might survive.

~~~
b_tterc_p
Curious if this resonates with others. That is hard to believe but I wasn’t
around to have an opinion.

~~~
ncmncm
People who lived it could be forgiven for wanting to forget.

I never had any direct contact with Microsoft code, but was surrounded by
people who did.

It should be noted that Windows NT/Vista/XP/7/8/10 are a different lineage,
and carry very little code from the 3.1/3.11/95/98/Me codebase, aside from
some UI subsystems. There was not much contact between the two groups, and (I
was told) a fair bit of bad blood.

If you find somebody claiming that crashes were not, at minimum, a daily event
on W95, you may commiserate over their amnesia. Many people ran Windows
programs under OS/2, where only the programs would crash, not the OS, and so
less often, and they did not need to reinstall the OS.

~~~
jussij
OS/2 had a big advantage over Windows in that it was an OS designed from the
ground up.

Windows started out life as nothing more than a GUI designed to make MS-DOS
look more like the Apple Macintosh.

One of Windows 3.x big strengths was it's ability to run a large number of MS-
DOS programs.

But that was also it's weakness because it also meant it had to run MS-DOS and
that OS was not much more than a boot loader and nothing like the modern
looking operating system like OS/2.

However a big reason why OS/2 failed was because OS/2 1.x could only run a
handful of MS-DOS programs and it ran them very badly.

People would use Windows 3.x ahead of OS/2 because Windows could run their MS-
DOS programs.

~~~
ncmncm
No, generally OS/2 ran Windows and DOS programs much more reliably than
Windows could. But you couldn't buy a machine with OS/2 on it (except from
IBM) because Microsoft had the market locked down, so it (1) cost money --
$100 was a lot, back then -- and (2) had to be installed over top of the
Windows already there. So, only a few geeks had it.

Rumors about incompatibilities spread because people preferred to rationalize
what they were already doing, and there was a lot of money in tuning and
fixing messed-up Windows systems that would have dried up.

~~~
jussij
OS/2 1.x was the competition for Windows 3.x and it ran DOS programs in a
thing colloquially called a _dog box_ so you can imagine how well that worked.

And that _dog box_ could only run MS-DOS and no Windows programs.

Now it is true OS/2 1.x only ran on an IBM PS/2 but when it came running
Windows and DOS it was no match for Windows 3.x itself.

Now OS/2 2.0 did run Windows and DOS program much better than Windows 3.x and
it ran on any machine that could run MS-DOS, but it came out after Windows 95.

OS/2 2.0 did this by using the hardware support built-in to the 80386 chip and
Windows 95 used that exact same hardware support to greatly improve on Windows
3.x.

Now while OS/2 2.0 was still much better than Windows 95, the race was lost
only because by the time it came out Windows 95 was a smash hit.

Also OS/2 2.0 needed a high end 80386 machine with lots of (and very
expensive) RAM where as Windows 95 ran just fine on low end 80386DX chips
using much less RAM.

~~~
jussij
This discussion got me thinking about OS/2 so I did some Googling and came
across this page:

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/11/half-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/5/)

From that page:

 _Unfortunately, OS /2 had a crucial flaw in its design: a Synchronous Input
Queue (SIQ). What this meant was that all messages to the GUI window server
went through a single tollbooth. If any OS/2 native GUI app ever stopped
servicing its window messages, the entire GUI would get stuck and the system
froze._

 _In 1996, IBM released OS /2 Warp 4, which included a revamped Workplace
Shell, bundled Java and development tools, and a long-awaited fix for the
Synchronous Input Queue. It wasn’t nearly enough. Sales of OS/2 dwindled while
sales of Windows 95 continued to rise._

 _Windows 95 was a smash success, breaking all previous records for sales of
operating systems._

So to clarify it was OS/2 Warp 4 that finally delivered on the promise of
_Windows Better than Windows_ , but unfortunately it just came too late.

------
rgovostes
Is this behavior related to the con\con bug?
[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/05/in-a-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/05/in-a-throwback-to-the-90s-ntfs-bug-lets-anyone-hang-or-
crash-windows-7-8-1/)

~~~
jzwinck
Definitely not.

------
neonate
How on earth did you find this?

