RE: tlug: FW: Windows 95

["Jonathan Byrne--3Web" <jq@example.com>]

>I've resisted forwarding this for a month and a half, but can't resist
>any longer...
>
>> For those of you who love Microsoft...

I think I first saw this about a year and a half ago :-)

>> that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

Funny thing is, standing competition is what Microsoft does better than
anything else.  Remember that they were once a very small company, but they
got big through a combination of being in the right place at the right time,
and through being very, very good at competition.  And of course, they also
do make a lot of very nice products that I wish they'd port to Linux :-)

There's a new book out about Microsoft, sort of a tell-all one, I gather.
It's written by the son of one of Bill Gates' close marketing advisors.
He's a programmer who did some of the earliest work on Windows, and various
other things at MS.  There is one anecdote, cited in the book review I saw
that you'll enjoy:

One day when the author was working on some on-screen clock program for
Windows way back when (this was probably the original Windows), he was using
a Microsoft Basic product and trying to do a flood-fill operation to put
color in the background, but it wasn't working.  Finally, he gave up and
wrote a new flood-fill algorithm and patched it in, then got the background
done.  Later that day when Bill Gates stopped in, he described the problem
and how he solved it and showed Gates the algorithm, with the rhetorical
comment about the original one that "Who wrote this brain-dead piece of
shit, anyway?"  Gates said that the algorithm was nice and went on his way.

After Gates was gone, someone mentioned that in fact it was Bill Gates who
had written the original :-)


>with a little creativity I could probably shoehorn a 64-bit Alpha/NT
>system in there

I'd rather shoehorn one of those into my house :-)

Here's a little piece of NT trivia passed on to me by a UNIX software
engineer I know: according to him, NT isn't really very much of a Microsoft
product.  All the important parts, including the marvelous NT file system,
were written by hired guns from DEC, the same ones who designed VAX VMS.
Apparently, about all Microsoft put in was the GUI and the Win32 API.  And
they took out some goodies the DEC people wanted in, such as support for
OS/2's HPFS.  Has anyone else heard this?

Cheers,

Jonathan



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