Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 at 19:31, Tomasz Rola via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I think the explanation for that is fairly clearly there in the history. NT 3.1 came soon after Windows 3. After the OS/2 "divorce" from IBM, MS ran its 2 big OS projects, Chicago and Cairo, more or less in parallel. Cairo was next-gen NT, Chicago was next-gen Windows 3, at that point intended to be "Windows 4". Cairo started to fall behind schedule very early. So more effort was given over to Chicago. A fair bit of the ambitious UI work for Cairo made its way over to Chicago. Cairo was intended to be semi "object oriented", with a database-oriented filesystem (something Be did better in BeOS' BFS). That never happened, but the object-based (rather than folder- or drive-based) system browser made it over to Chicago. The Explorer, as it came to be known, uses several "virtual folders" -- "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood". "Control Panel" etc. These have no location in the filesystem, you can't manually put anything in them or delete anything -- they only appear in Explorer, automatically populated with stuff _drawn_ from the filesystem or the Registry. Those are the vestiges of the Cairo object system. In itself, these things are vestigial remainder of concepts in NeXTstep, Xerox Smalltalk, HP NewWave and so on. By this stage, the real meaning has been forgotten, and "object oriented" has become a buzzword meaning, vaguely, that the user manipulates "objects" which may not genuinely exist as files or folders in the filesystem. They're virtual entities, generated by the OS on the fly. There was substance behind them once. But, in a pattern that is very typical of the development of the digital computer, especially microcomputers, the evolution goes like this: [1] someone, probably an academic, invents a new concept [2] someone else tries to implement it, finds it hard, and has to bodge it in some way -- with hardware extensions, or an abstraction layer, or faking it up and presenting it as if it were real [3] (a) another company copies the general idea but, lacking the conceptual underpinning, simplifies it into near-meaninglessness ... or... [3] (b) the other company finds a much quicker, simpler way to implement it, such as by doing it in cheap software rather than expensive hardware, or by some clever hack to another part of the system. Examples to illustrate my point: [a] Microsoft decided to add an RDBMS to its new OS. (It's not integrated from the start, like in Pick.) [b] It talks widely about some of the things this will enable, such as querying the filesystem like querying a database rather than iteratively searching [c] Be builds a new OS from scratch, and free from legacy compatibility restrictions, designs a filesystem with extensible, queryable attributes, thus achieving MS' goal with no database involved. [d] Apple fakes the end result of this by hacking a file-modification-watching daemon into its Unix, enabling the daemon to maintain an index for the whole filesystem. That in turn enables near-instant searching, without needing a whole new filesystem. [e] Microsoft having now been comprehensively outdone, abandons its database-in-the-filesystem idea and tries to bolt-on a filesystem indexer -- but because its OS is far more widely-used by a far broader range of hardware and software, it can't do the low-level hackery necessary without breaking legions of 3rd party apps, so the MS implementation is poor and takes years & multiple product generations to get working. It's a sort of horrible sequel (see what I did there?) to the Osborne Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect I strongly disagree. (And I am no Microsoft apologist!) On the one hand, the cosmetics. *Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95. The Win95 Explorer re-wrote the book on OS UI design. The _only_ company to resist was Apple, because of course, some of the reasons that Win95 is the way it is are attempts to do things differently from Apple so as not to get sued. Look at other contemporaries of the original MacOS -- DR GEM, especially Atari ST GEM, and Amiga OS -- and you'll see how they very clearly draw from MacOS. And DR did get sued and PC GEM was crippled as a result. MS, a few orders of magnitude bigger, had to avoid this. Secondly, the tech. Look at Raymond Chen's "old new thing" blog and other sources for the tech brilliance that led to Windows 3. Consider how very compatible 95 was with DOS drivers and Win3 apps. That was some virtuoso stuff. OS/2 (especially 2.x but also later), by comparison, was vastly less compatible and vastly less stable, with big performance-sapping chunks of 16-bit code, including the filesystem -- which even Windows for Workgroups 3.11 replaced! -- it single input queue and so on. OS/2 was and is a pig to install, to maintain, to update, it wasn't very compatible with anything else, was totally incompatible with DOS and Windows drivers, and wasn't all that stable. And its UI was ugly and clunky, IMHO. Win95 was astonishingly compatible, both with DOS drivers and apps, and with Windows 3 drivers, and yet it was 32-bit in the important places, delivered true preemptive multitasking, reasonably fast virtual memory, integrated networking, integrated Internet access, and a radical, clean, elegant UI which *every single OS after it* has copied. Not really, no! There honestly wasn't anything to compare or compete with it. Linux was very primitive and clunky back then. OS/2 wasn't much better. NT took years to catch up, only really getting there in 2000 and still needing massively more hardware. 95 was an industry-transforming product, bringing much of the user-level power and elegance of the Mac to the COTS PC platform. Consider the anecdote about the swan: http://www.horebinternational.com/the-swan-metaphor/ "BE LIKE A SWAN GRACEFUL BUT FURIOUSLY PADDLING BELOW THE SURFACE" Considering the layers of hacks below the surface, Win9x was amazingly stable and reliable, and used by more people than all iterations of all other GUI OSes of the times up to then put together. It spawned the entire industry of media-capable Internet-connected home/entertainment computers. I'm amazed as a confirmed MS skeptic that I have to defend it like this, I must say! -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053