Windows 3.0 turns 20 Windows 3.0, arguably Microsoft's first effective graphical user interface, turned 20 this past weekend. On May 22, 1990, Redmond introduced the 32-bit GUI (not an operating system - Win 3.0 ran on top of DOS), and by doing so, it put the fear of Gates into any Apple fanboi honest enough to see the 16-color writing on the …
You could set up country options or somesuch using it. I had a bit of software called Superbase (IIRC) with the Windows 2.0 runtime (dig those colours!). But this had a fairly critical flaw. If you loaded up the Control Panel and then quit the main application, all the text would vanish. If you tried to close Control Panel, the machine would hang.
Smile because, hey, it's the weekend.
I once had the fun of installing OS/2 from about 25 3,5 inch floppies and it was a Royal Pain In the Backside.
NT 3.51 was a breeze compared to that - insert floppy and press return a couple of times - done. Also, I remember reading some very funny stuff about OS/2 internals. NT demonstrated that Microsoft had learned quite a few things about proper operating systems and it probably was one of the best pieces of technology they ever released.
The whole Windows/Office franchise is based on this robust operating system that can also be secure, if properly used. That most users are using it the retarded way while believing in that Protection Scam (Virus Scanners), does not change that.
Running Unix as root is as insecure as running NT (including it's latest incarnation VISTA and Windows 7) as Administrator. Blame MS for not setting up a normal user by default, but don't blame the architects of NT for a lack of security.
Regarding VISTA - based on number of installations it certainly is less of a fail than all Linux distributions taken together. If you have 2Gig of RAM, it runs very well and is as stable as XP. My only complaint is that they changed the location of certain things more or less at random. The truth is that nobody needs the "innovations" of VISTA and win7 except the Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft. I bet XP will be used by the year 2020 in the millions.
And yes, the file system permission system UI is screwed up since the first version of WNT. But on a PC, this does not matter so much most of the time. Also, there are command-line tools to change the ACLs.
Yeah, that's Win NT version 4 (see my previous list). It would still be a strong seller today if MS actually sold it. It runs on 256MB of RAM easily. NT in general has been too good for MS. They have not many options to sell something more robust with later releases, so they keep fumbling with the UI and naming to create an illusion of "innovations".
Actually, NT4 had everything we need TO THE PRESENT DAY, only the UI *looks* a bit different. I ran it properly on a 48MB RAM 80486-CPU machine with about 1Gig of harddisk !
So all the "modern hardware requirements" are essentially bloat that only exist to sell new Windows licenses and new hardware.
USB, modern DirectX, Firewire, IPv6, Active Directory, large disk support, large memory support, x64 support, CIFS, updated scripting, a patch management server, a half decent web server, support for GUID disks, integrated (not a separate product) terminal services and much improved group policy and deployment tools.
Yep, you're right, NT 4 had absolutely everything we require in the present day..
I'll give you all the items relating to hardware that didn't exist at the time. Your right, NT4 didn't support them. I find it hard to accept that as a criticism. Are you suggesting that NT4 could not have supported them? Was its kernel intrinsically flawed in a way that prevented the addition of (say) USB support or (even more absurdly) IPv6 packet formats? Was the only solution really to replace the user shell in favour of one designed by Tinky-Winky and implemented as a series of ActiveX controls?
I won't give you the other bloat, like a patch management server, web server, CIFS or indeed anything else that could and should be deployed as an application rather than baked into the OS. These would have just as easy to add to NT4 as they were to add to the later OS editions where they finally appeared.
Of course, that doesn't sell upgrades, which is why it didn't happen, but that's hardly a technical objection.
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.. Windows NT. I was told back in more youthful days, that NT stood for "Not Tested" by one of my piers. I believed him at the time too, because he was more senior & they would not lie to some one at a much lower level for amusement.....
I would like to thank Microsoft (& Apple) for producing pieces of software that are "crap" & has kept me in beer, cheap package holidays to Spain, Greece, Egypt & Morocco for the last 12 years. Nice one Gates & Jobs....... can you keep churning out the rubbish for another 15 years as my mortgage will be paid off then. Only after that, you may be allowed to get it right... tho I very much doubt you will :)
Beer icon..... its the only thing that's stops me punching the computer after another "WHY WONT YOU JUST BLOODY WORK" screaming fit at Windows/OS X.
While working on contract for a large UK (recently almost ex-) bank, I was mystified as to why critical financial systems were run on Windows servers with legions of sysadmins typing daily incantations and supplications just to keep them running. In frustration I asked a colleague why we consultants weren't recommending a move to something a little better suited to the environment.
His reply?
"We get paid by the hour."
Says it all really.
Actually I preferred Windows V2.0, on a hercules monocrome monitor. My Windows 3 experiences began with WFW3.11. Dead easy to install over a Novell Network by keeping a mirror of a standard workstation hard drive on the server, & keeping the room specific ini files in a separate directory - sigh
But "wonky and crash-prone" was not the standards of the time. It was Microsoft's standards, and some would say it still is.
I think it would be fairer to say that it still was until they released W2K
I can't imagine, really, what MS did brief its programmers to produce, since reliability, stability, security, were so utterly and conspicuously absent.
"I can't imagine, really, what MS did brief its programmers to produce, since reliability, stability, security, were so utterly and conspicuously absent."
Reliability, stability and security only matter *after* you've bought it. For twenty years we had a growing market where the majority of buyers were either first timers or sufficiently inexperienced that they didn't know how badly they were being shafted. In such a market, the winning strategy is to produce as much as you can as cheaply as you can.
MS understood this. Apparently no-one else did.
The market is probably different now, with most purchasing decisions being made by someone who has had at least one bad sting. MS appear to be having trouble. I wonder if they can turn their corporate culture round fast enough?
At the time (early 1990s) the Amiga had a far superior OS and hardware set to what was around which dominated much of the home/professional TV studios/computer graphics market. Hell, even NASA had a set of Amiga 4000's running simulations up until the late 1990s when they were decomissioned.... I would say the PC only caught up around the mid-90's.
As for Windows, that only got 'good/useful' by the time 2000/XP came along.
Paris, because even she would choose an Amiga as did Debbie Harry at the launch in 1985.
Unix Userland programs are not better than MS user-level code. I recently had Solaris make crashing one (with a SIGSEV) me because I used too many variables in a makefile. This is a often-used tool which is already 40 years old now...
The architecture of NT and Unix makes things stable - protect the kernel and the file system from messy code done by application programmers (including build chain developers).
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