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The 'DOS Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run' Myth
Otter writes "We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". Adam Barr investigates the myth, interviewing various Microsoft and Lotus old-timers (including Mitch Kapor), and finds no basis for its legitimacy or any case of 1-2-3 actually not running. Whom to blame for Lotus Notes is not discussed."
How can this be? Does that mean my whole life as a MS-bashing Slashdotter is nothing but... nothing?!? Well, I'm sure "DOS Ain't Done til Linux Won't Run"!!
On a more serious note though, the first reply in the article says it all.
Microsoft is a for-profit company, so it will do anything to make a profit. If billions of people are rushing out to buy Longhorn so that they can play Tux Racer, Microsoft will make sure "Longhorn ain't done til Tux Racer run".
It's also interesting to see from one of the comments:
Well, I submitted this to Slashdot. (And even added an Obligatory Stupid Inflammatory Remark at the end!) I have a pretty dismal track record of accepted submissions, though, and this one isn't likely to change it.
COME ON!! People are making fun of us!!!!!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I doubt many of those people still exist 10 years later, but I'm sure there are a few people happily clacking away on their Wangs, saving to floppies, printing with 9-pin dot matrix, and happy because that's all they need.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
From the article:
And there was an incident in the early pre-release days of NT where our boot sector code broke multi-boot with OS/2; in that case, despite claims of outrage from the Blue Ninja Clan, it was simply that we had never tested that configuration; once we heard about the bug, we fixed it and added it to our test mix.
This made me laugh; Windows installation has never been shy about overwriting LILO (and later GRUB), and the Linux user base has to be roughly as large as OS/2's was in its heyday. But hey, all's fair.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I remember a quite notorious bug with NT SP3 that broke Notes clients and servers on both NT Workstation and Server.
Of course, that was just bad QA by Microsoft or Lotus. but it used to be used as the example of 'why you shouldn't immediately patch your NT boxen'.
-EvilMagnus
Uses it to run Lotus 123 and some forestry consulting software.
Regardless of whether the quote is true, I'd still like to see the company that makes the OS and the company that makes software that runs on the OS be separate entities.
Perhaps it should say "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus.... wait... WTF is Lotus?"
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
I tried installing Windows from 3.5" floppies using my 1581 disk drive on my Commodore 64. No dice. I even SYS 64738'd the system at least 10 times and the darn thing wouldn't even read the weird 1.4 meg format that Microsoft stores their floppies in.
Clearly, they're cutting Commodore out of the market.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This might just be a /. variation on the factual test applied to gray boxes in the 1980s: "it ain't really IBM PC compatible until it runs Lotus 1-2-3 and draws a chart".
... was invented by Ray Ozzie who modeled it after the PLATO system at the University of Illinois.
For a long time (ca. 1990s), it was considered superior to Microsoft Exchange, until the Internet came along (i.e. became popular) and everything changed.
Notes was actually quite a clever piece of software during its heyday. No one else could do replication at the time. The only thing that people hated about it was its price: it cost too much for what it did.
We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"
I've used Windows for 9 years and have read slashdot for 7, and I've never heard "the story."
Consider their desire to not bother supporting standards in their browsers.
Lets see - you start a new security policy, and your software violates that policy... Yup - it doesn't work
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
From the first comment to the article:
"DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run" - I can't say that I've ever heard that phrase before, but it definitely sounds like something the Slashdot crowd would say.
Ahh to see yourselves as others see you....
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
And Windows 3.0 didn't explicitly check for DR-DOS and print out a messages stating that it wouldn't work properly with anything other the MS-DOS either... except that I actually saw that error message on a CRT in the lab.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
is there going to be a win 3.1 service pack? i'm dying here, come on!
lameness filter thwarted.
Actually, it's well documented that in DOS (4.0 I beleive), Microsoft intentionally made Quarterdeck's Memory extender QEMM.SYS not work. Renaming the executable to QEMM386.SYS resolved the problem and caused the program to work without any incompatilbilities. They've definately done it.
To imply this is a slashdot meme is patently wrong.
I remember this saying. It camer about when a MS Dos release came out, and Lotus stopped working. Then MS ignored people who need help. I was one of those people.
Fortunatly it worked with other companies DOS.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Really? All I could find on it was this cool French airline company logo
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I came via Apple II+ -> Amiga -> Ibm.
It was well known back then that "Dos isn't ready until Lotus 1.2.3. doesn't work" because it (and other competitors) were repeatedly broken with dos 3, dos 4, dos 5, dos 6, dos 6.22, dos 6.2, etc. Excel always worked- amazing. A few weeks to a few months later, they would figure out what microsoft had done to them and a patch would fix them.
The new variation as of windows 95 was to certify a product as "ready for windows". Word95 broke standards (back door api calls for performance) but was certified. Products from companies besides Microsoft wouldn't be "ready for windows" unless they followed the API.
Word perfect and others followed the API and were performance hogs.
But I guess someone is rewriting history now. Regardless- I know what I lived through.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The is the Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters website to some that admits to working for Microsoft... I'm sure he'd be real forthcoming about it if he had some dirt on Microsoft, wouldn't he? Gee, what are the chances that Microsoft is actually paying him to write this blog?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I was a hardware designer back then so I know what I'm talking about. If DOS didn't run Lotus, people wouldn't buy it, plain and simple. Lotus was the killer ap. Microsoft had nothing that would take it's place and Microsoft absolutely needed it to sell DOS. Either propaganda or mindless speculation.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Microsoft went through great pains to get SimCity to work, but ignored Lotus 123. I don't think so.
Uh, Lotus competed with MS, SimCity did not.
Go Fuck a Donkey
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Not only was the error message completely bogus, but microsoft went to significant lengths to try to encrypt the detection code. This is known as the infamous "AARD" code. It was discovered by Geoff Chappell and Andrew Schulman wrote about it in Dr. Dobbs' journal.
In the antitrust trials, evidence (internal emails) were uncovered which proved this was a deliberate move on the part of microsoft.
an email from Phil Barrett (lead developer of windows 3.1):
There are other examples and evidence, but this is one of the most damning.
The successive breakage of Novell Netware client packages on Win 3.1/95 systems also comes to mind. Microsoft got you to use their client package basically by keeping it stable while breaking successive revisions of Novell's client software.
Considering the Novell software was in general superior in terms of performance and features, this was a gross detriment to the users, beside the anticompetitive nature of the acts.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You know, one of the dumbest things about an article like this is the attempt at being definitive.
It's like writing an article that states "We asked the CIA about assassination, and the CIA said it never killed anyone. When we interviewed various ex-CIA employees, they agreed."
Does this guy really believe that he'd find someone who would say "oh yeah, we used to f*ck up competitor's stuff all the time."
I'd say "look at the trail of broken applications behind the various DOS revisions, not the mea culpas of the people today."
The Slashdot story sounds to me like revisionism. There were many cases of incompatibility. Maybe they weren't put there deliberately, but incompatibilities that degraded serious competition seemed to take a long time to fix.
Here's an example from today, in Windows XP SP2: Why is it that, during an install or re-install of Windows XP, Windows can never find the Logitech mouse drivers? Windows finds other mouse drivers. Is it because Logitech makes better pointing devices than Microsoft?
I thought it was gonna be an article about old-timers who wouldn't give up their precious MSDOS running 386s because it ran their Lotus 1-2-3.
"The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of DOS, to give a competitive advantage to its own applications while the other company scrambled to work around the block that Microsoft had inserted."
Rumor eh? I suppose the fact that Microsoft has been in court for the last 20 years over this type of thing is rumor also?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Microsoft's biggest competitor is itself.
If your business relied on MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3, and the next version of MS-DOS didn't run Lotus, why the hell would you upgrade?
MS isn't that stupid.
new troll?
in my day we had lotus 12
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So we can rule out MS malevolence as the reason 3rd party software would not work. Can we rule out MS incompetence?
So next I suppose we'll find out that the Holocaust never really happened, and African slaves in the confederate south were generally happy and well treated.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I used to have to use Copy II to dupe Lotus 1-2-3 disks - which only allowed three installs, so we just duped the original floppy and used up the copy floppy every time we had to reinstall because someone munged their computer - and this is why copy protection stopped working, as business rerouted around the damage.
... well ... evil - but they did. It was either that or lose market share, as at that time Windows wasn't as important as DOS was, and people could have easily switched over to a different OS with a different competing GUI - and Lotus was pushing their own GUI, so it was a very real and strong threat.
But I specifically remember the CRT screen messages from the fake check that MSFT did back then to kill off DR-DOS.
Maybe you don't think they would do something so
Inside the corporations noone cared about MSFT, or Windows - all they cared about was: can it run my Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets and does it have a word processer with mailmerge.
Maybe to newbs nowadays this seems unthinkable, but it was very real back then.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
bit trollish phrasing, but here's a news article of the6 734-cp.html
real event
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2005/08/02/115
yes, a jet crashed at Toronto (Pearson) airport today.
-k
I'd say that the author gets some brownie points for explicitly declaring his affiliation. Or at least loses fewer brownie points. Either way, it's a hell of an improvement on Steve Barkto et al.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I think that is also why offic2003 is facing such a low penetration in the teens. So if you know wp5.1, why not?!
What I remember was a DOS upgrade where QEMM.EXE wouldn't load, but renaming it to XEMM.EXE (or anything else) loaded and ran just fine.
Yes, Microsoft pulled this crap against various software vendors, even of Lotus wasn't one of them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Proudly serving my corporate masters" -- need I say anything more?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I always heard it about Windows 3.1.
"Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
Never heard that 'saying' concerning DOS.
Edith Keeler Must Die
And there was an incident in the early pre-release days of NT where our boot sector code broke multi-boot with OS/2; in that case, despite claims of outrage from the Blue Ninja Clan, it was simply that we had never tested that configuration; once we heard about the bug, we fixed it and added it to our test mix.
Ive been around computers for a long time and ive never heard of the blue ninja clan, can anyone enlighten me.
Don't worry you can continue bashing microsoft and you can even use the phrase "Dos ain't done till lotus won't run" in a week or so to get +5 moderation.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I think that "neo luddite" is quite harsh. If anything, it's 1984-speak encouraging unnecessary consumerism. I happen to run very (5+ years) at home and at work because.. well... they work. This used to be the geek way... be frugal, and make it work. Now even the geeks have caved into the consumer culture... buy the newest thing, even if you don't need it (best example of this is the Apple fanatics). A Luddite was a person who was angry with the new technology and hated it. I simply see it as not needing it, and spending my hard-earned money on more useful, interesting, and fun things. If people want to buy a new OS every few years because it makes them happy... great for them. But don't call those of us who believe in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" "neo-luddites". It's insulting.
Yes, we know you do Mr. Gates... :)
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
This updates windows 3.1 to 3.11.
No it does not add networking, if you want that you want windows for workgroups, but Id recommend version 3.11
Well actually.... On MY Apple IIgs...with a PC transporter card installed (complete with the optional 8087 coprocessor)...I did load DOS 5.0 and..on that Windows 3.0 . The PC Transporter was a 8086 vintage coprocessor card that sported a 8086 CPU, 640k of memory, and a few ports for attaching 5.25 360k drives, a 800k Apple II drive (which it saw as a 720k) and a AT style keyboard. You could also hook up a CGA monitor or use the included "color-Switch" board to hook it to the existing Apple RGB screen. The setup ran on emulated FAT12 yes, FAT12 disk images on the Apple II ProDOS drive. Oh, and I could run Lotus on the beast.... And did. The cross platform capabilities of this beast were phenomenal.
Your 1581 drive by the way is a collectable these days....
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Troll "ripped from the headlines" (Law and Order style)... An Air France flight rolled off the runway in Toronto, on its way to Paris. No deaths if I remember.
From the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4740539.stm
Good research... way to track that one down.
I think this illuminates the problems discussed in the post about anonymous sources. This article is a perfect example of the problem with anonymous sources. "one Microsoft programmer" talks about a "few of the key people", makes other claims, slanders Gates, and basically makes a totally unsubstantiated claim. Is there any supporting evidence that there were actually problems with Lotus 1-2-3 and DOS 2.0? If so, is there some record of what the issue was (a bug report), a patch to DOS 2.0 or to 1-2-3? Any other proof other than the allegations of an unnamed unconfirmed programmer who allegedly worked for Microsoft?
At the time lotus did not compete with MS either, MS needed them to work to be able to sell there OS.
We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"
From the article:
Kapor was kind enough to put me in touch with some old Lotus people he knew. And they all corroborated the story: "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before.
Me neither.
Who is this 'we' of which you speak?
Well, I don't think that the main compatibility problem for 1-2-3 was command.com. cmd.exe may look like DOS, smell like DOS and crash like DOS, but it isn't DOS. NTVDM is.
> Your 1581 drive by the way is a collectable these days....
Wow, I wonder what that makes my SFD-1001s?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I didn't say Logitech mice don't work. I meant Windows has to be shown Logitech drivers manually, unlike the products of most companies.
"Nowadays, I know from personal experience that today Microsoft takes application compatibility very seriously."
Sure, like their Java compatibility and XML compatibility. Please, give me a break. Have you been living in a cave or is MS sending you a check?
If he were alive today we'd flame his spelling. :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
What sort of port are they connected to? If it's PS/2 then you probably get a generic PS/2 driver, because the port doesn't let you query hardware ID in a standard way.
USB should be ok though.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Don't you think five apostrophes in a single story headline is a bit... excessive?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The truth is that when released onto the market MS-DOS 4 with Microsoft's first attempt at a Character based User Interface (CUI) Shell and switching task manager was *NOT* backwardly compatible with a *LOT* of third party software. This included problems with Lotus 1.2.3 and many Turbo Pascal v3 and v4 programs that used third party CUIs libraries. The MS/IBM-DOS 3.x behaviors used were well document and widely used and their change in MS-DOS 4 were restored back to MS-DOS 3.x usage when Microsoft released MS-DOS 5.
The result was that MS-DOS 4 was an abysmal failure in the market which led a lot of technically minded people to replace it with the older MS-DOS 3.3 or DR-DOS when it became available. MS-DOS 4, like Microsoft BOB, is rarely mentioned by Microsoft because of their utter failure in the market.
However, the choice to release MS-DOS 4 onto the market with the changes in behavior which were incompatable with many DOS 3 applications had to be a conscious decision made by MS-DOS executives.
well when it comes to spending their money. Now yours on the other hand, they bill for staples, and anything else they can justify.
It's common practice to re-write history, so this article isn't a surprise. It's also common to pretend that people used to play together nicely "in the good old days". You might, however, ask why the rumor came into existence, what evidence people found for it at the time, and why it was believed.
I find latter-day appologists to be lacking in credibility. You can believe them if you want. Next we'll be told that the "Netscape Engineers are weenies" affair was a myth, too. And I'll believe that just about as much.
I don't know whether Adam Barr is a liar or a dupe, and I don't really care. He not somebody one should rely on. You did get the headline on his page, though, didn't you. "Proudly serving my corporate masters" lays his attitude out straight. And also tells you what you can trust him to say/do.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I had a lot of colleagues watching me as I set things up.
Much to my chagrin, I found that Lotus wouldn't run right. I called Lotus tech support. They informed me that they were aware of the issue, and that a patch would out come shortly.
They did patch it quite quickly, so it wasn't a big issue for the company. But when you have just spent thousands of dollars of your department's money, and things aren't running right, you tend to remember!
I did, and the article clearly states that steps were taken to obfuscate the code that generated the error message. The author, who says he normally gives MS the benefit of the doubt (mentioning "whining competitors"), reaches the conclusion that the bug was put there deliberately, and that there was no legitimate reason (in terms of software functionality) for it. He also points out that at least one program (WIN.COM) would terminate on getting that error. The fact that they took it out of the final version doesn't change the fact that they did it in the first place -- releasing a product with deliberate code intended to mislead the consumer into believing that a competitor's product was faulty.
I think you missed the point. The phrase referred to the current release build of DOS from Microsoft not being finished until they had broken Lotus 123 compatibility. TFA had nothing to do with the obsolescence of DOS.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Of course, Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera fail that test too.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The ex-Lotusers I contacted were certainly around Lotus back in the DOS 2.0 days so I would think they would remember intentional sabotage.
- adam
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
I guess im either stuck in qemu, virtual pc, or god help me in upgrading.
Forget Notes. Whatever happened to Lotus Agenda? I owned it once, the disks now being lost to time. Hell of a program - a sort of free form database that was pretty easy to use. I wish I had it now.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
If the author of the article was actually around when the 'DOS ain't done...' thing actually happened, he'd know better than to try to dispute it. I personally experienced incompatibilities introduced in version of MSDOS 3.x as well as in Windows NT.
I've seen Lotus, Word Perfect and TCP/IP driver stack 'mysteriously' break by 'upgrading' or 'patching' the Microsoft OS. I really came to hate Microsoft operating systems because I'd seen so much of this kind of thing. Even though I was very knowledgeable with MS software, I chose to work on other OS (Novell, IBM OS/2, Linux) because of my feelings about Microsoft's behavior.
But what's really chapping my ass these days are the people who are trying to re-write history to exonerate Microsoft's past behavior. It seems to be an entire industry and it must be lucrative. Too bad Slashdot is helping that industry by giving it air time.
Best regards.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The sequence in the article is all wrong. MS didn't sabotage Lotus 123 until they were pushing Excel (initially for DOS); that's a bit later than the initial compatibility period.
But the pattern by MS is pretty overwhelmingly clear. For example, who remembers Windows 3.12? This version literally added *NO* feature to 3.11 except breaking compatibility with "OS/2 for Windows" (the version of OS/2 that would use an existing Windows installation as a compatibility runtime environment). There was quite literally not one single bug fix or feature added--it consisted solely of a useless call outside the memory space managed by OS/2's environment.
Or the version of Windows (I forget Windows 2.??) that did nothing except sniff memory for DR-DOS, then refuse to run if it was found. DR-DOS was, in fact, completely compatible functionally (and even managed memory better), but MS wanted users to buy their DOS.
And, and, and... it's dishonest dissimulation to pretend MS hasn't done this throughout their entire history.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Has anyone told The Register that HTML now supports breaking text up into multiple paragraphs?
That article is most likely interesting, but my eyes hurt just looking at that massive blob of text.
I was talking about new mice, with new computers being prepared for customers.
Have you ever tried it yourself?
There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
There was no such thing as "upgrading" to Win 3.1. You didn't "migrate" from DOS, you installed Windows and ran it from the command line when you needed it.
Some things did need the GUI, and quite a few apps / games wouldn't run in it. At some point the you began to boot into Windows by default and hop out when necessary, instead of the other way round, but to call that an "upgrade" in today's terms obscures the parallelism we had to put up with until 9x.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Although I guess it would have been cool to run my win16 stuff in a win64 world, but I guess even Microsoft wants to cut the strings at some point.
You get +1 in imaginary karma in my book.
I still have mine though.
James Wallace's 1993(92?) book Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire references it.
According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to breakdown when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.
Quote found at: http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B555.html
I don't have the book and it would be quite interesting to see how author Wallace would respond. I do quite vividly recall the phrase going around in the early 90's, particularly among several of my clients who were running Lotus products.
If you want to talk about bad practices on the DOS days, there's a lot to talk about on most software companies of that time. That "In Search Of Stupidity" book talk about a whole lot of them. I don't remember any example right now, but it sure is a good read for anyone that thinks "Microsoft == THE evil".
What does pass? A development version of the Apple webkit and what else?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
...author James Wallace, who wrote the 1993 book Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, which presents an apparently direct quote from a "Microsoft programmer" who worked on DOS 2.x and made the claim. I don't have the book and the informant isn't attributed by name in the little excerpt I read online, so I recognize that it could be sloppy reportage/sensationalism on Wallace's part. But is he still around and has anyone asked for comment from him?
One of the excerpts I've found online is here: http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B555.html
Until recently (last two years), the largest of the electronic stock markets (ISLAND ECN)still ran thousands of DOS machines, hacked up to support extra memory on Pentium III's and Pentium IV's all running Fox Pro. Dos is the best product EVER to come out of MS, and I am sure will be for sometime.
Sorry, your invitation is over here.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Fascinating!
In other news, Colin Powell performs an internal review of the army and discovers that the Mai Lai massacre was a "myth". Well, I'm glad we got that straightened out.
In the meantime, though, perhaps we should round out the set of fuzzy feel-good quotes from this blog with, oh, I don't know, the actual allegations that these fuzzy feel-good quotes are supposedly refuting. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of early-80s PC software myself, but this seems as good a source for that as any. It is some sort of document filed with the U.S. courts by the Consumer Federation of America in protest of the antitrust "settlement" which allowed Microsoft to avoid the remedy/punishment phase of their recent antitrust trial. Let's see:
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Microsoft's EMM grew out the LIM extended memory manager specification. LIM = Lotus, Intel, Microsoft.
Yes, Lotus and Microsoft partnered together to let DOS load a driver to access RAM greater than 640 KB. Prior to LIM, each memory card came with its own driver.
DOS 3.31 included a new EMM which aligned memory access on word boundaries, not byte boundaries.
Microsoft's claim was that this would be speedier; the trade off of speed for bloat was worth it to them - they saw the future, and it included more RAM.
And heck - it broke MS Excel's biggest competitor too: double win!
Infoworld did an in depth piece on the controversy, and got a quote from a product manager at Microsoft who stated that yes, they "knew there were problems." (When asked if they tested against Lotus 1-2-3 - the biggest app in the world at that time).
Note that Microsoft did not tell Lotus of the change to shipping code, prior to release. Well, not enough prior to let Lotus present a compatible version.
So the real test (mimicking the pain I went through at the time) is: find a copy of DOS 3.30, load it. Install Windows 3.0. Install the (non-GUI) Lotus 1-2-3. Verify it runs. Then "upgrade" to DOS 3.31. Attempt to run Lotus 1-2-3.
You will get a nasty "This application has violated system integrity" message and be told to reboot. You will also read the insinuation that Lotus has its head up its ass.
And if you then "downgrade" to DOS 3.30, things will be fine.
Just for grins, then run the character mode Lotus 1-2-3 in a window, and run the brand new GUI-based MS Excel on the same platform. Likely, you will be appalled at the snail pace of all that GUI junk. It would seriously cause you to wonder if the GUI was worth it.
Even on calculation bound sheets, Excel was 40% slower. Microsoft seriously needed something more important than MS Paint to convince people they needed Windows. And that was a spreadsheet - except Lotus 1-2-3 in character mode whipped Excel's ass. Intervention was needed.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Maybe he has a 1987 vintage Logitech Bus Mouse.
*rim-shot*
Very good, I was about to post this comment myself when I saw yours. I found it using groups.google.com searching for "1-2-3 won't run" getting to a July 1992 post which cited the quote from "a newly-released bio of Uncle Bill" which I correctly guessed to be "Hard Drive". If you had posted non-anonymously you might have some mod points now...
In the 486/386 many computers had a turbo button because running at higher speeds break the bizarre copy protection scheme Lotus used on it's floppy diskettes.
Without the ability to slow down, Lotus would refuse to run.
I'll say DOS is done when it is useless. In Windows, there are still a lot of things that are faster, easier, and quicker using a DOS prompt.
DOS might be done in Vista when they add MSH to the mix. But even then, DOS will continue to live on in legacy and embedded systems for many years to come.
No one forces you to buy Windows.
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Husi is where's it at
I was a developer on the MSDOS team for many years. That statement is indeed a myth. All effort was to make all programs remain compatible from version to version. Major products like Lotus 123 were especially important to get working because they were what the customers used. Sometimes this was very difficult, as in those days, applications commonly edited system data structures and sometimes even the code.
To be so crass as to reply to myself, I did a google search and found a page where one can actually download Lotus Agenda:
http://www.bobnewell.net/agenda.html
(sorry for lack of html sk1lz)
All I can say is: "Wow". It's still a cool program. And, it appears to work just fine (for me anyhow) in a DOS box in XP, so (just to get back on topic), I'm not so sure that MS is deliberately breaking it's OS to drive out the competition. MS was, and is today, probably engaged in the usual sort of semi-competent behavior.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Often times, with the proper OS rev the client worked fine. It's just if you patched/upgraded, or added additional 'functionality' that Microsoft provided, that the issues arose.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
W95 just went: ... non-DOS partition detected ... Reformating ...
And that was the end of my Mandrake.
I thought that someone could probably sue them for the value of the lost data. It was _clearly_ intentional
MS certainly does push APIs that they don't really use internally. Win32/s and MFC were good examples of that one.
.NET, despite them pushing it extremely hard. It still might end up being the first broad API toolkit that they actually do use, besides the straight Windows API. They pushed and used DirectX, too, of course. We'll have to wait for the next release of Office, and a closer look at Longhorn and IE7 to be sure of their .NET committment.
They're not really using
In Linux, you can stick the sticky bit on the executable to circumvent that, but yes. That was the fault of the program, not MS.
It's amazing people still think their business can remain viable without paying protection fees to MS. Why doesn't somneone just run some numbers and see what corps who sided squarely against purchasing MS products on a large-scale have survived? The stat would never be published. Doug Hettinger www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
Well, never have I seen this! Not a single comment is above the threshold! Not a single Insightful comment, not a single Funny one!
Ladies and gentleman, I declare slashdot braindead.
That's exactly how I dug it up. (I considered posting non-anonymously, but was too lazy.) Pretty cool how Amazon lets you search in books, eh?
seriously. None of the replies are rated high enough to be shown in full... Just a long line of subjects.. looks like no one gives a flying... about DOS or Lotus... HAHAHA
>> It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
You're right, it's a shitty way to write an OS. Unfortunately, if MS "breaks" some program because the ISV used undocumented APIs or reserved fields who do you think gets blamed? If that program has enough users (like anything Adobe makes) then MS has to make a check to restore the broken behavior for the bad app.
There's a story on some MS blog about a software vendor who forced MS to debug their software which broke on a Windows upgrade. Turned out they used a reserved field which the new version of Windows started using. And the vendor was like "You (MS) can't use that field! It's reserved!"
Unbelievable! I look for comments with a minimum rating of 1 and I dont see a single one!
Is everyone just flamin' today?
I think what you really mean is that the OS division of Microsoft should not be making certain information available to the apps division of Microsoft that they do not make available to third parties -- like the "alternative" APIs and the documentation without the deliberate mistakes.
Certain MS apps ride the metal in places, simply because they can -- this is most of the reason why IE is such a useful attack vector. Everyone else has to put up with the "official" {slow and buggy} abstraction layers. MS aren't fixing the abstraction layers because they don't really care -- they don't use them anyway.
If Microsoft were to split into two -- and the job was done properly -- then the applications division would not be able to get this privileged information from the OS division unless every other software company was also allowed access to it. So either MS apps would have to start using the official APIs {which would be sorted sharpish} or third party apps would get to use the unofficial ones.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up and even overtaking. GNU/Linux on the desktop is entirely feasible unless you insist to have certain crappy appliances, to the point where absolute n00bs without preconceptions actually prefer it over Windows. Anything Microsoft do that breaks backward compatibility will give Open Source a foot in the door -- if the insecurity inherent in the closed-source model does not lead to its undoing first. {Who'd've thought that just by reverse-engineering a stack of patches, you can make certain discoveries about the vulnerability being patched -- and either slip in one last attack in the brief window just before people apply the patch, or work around the patch? Expect worse the closer decompilation comes to readiness.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
That wasn't a bug in Windows then... just Notes was broken.
I wonder if the code to do that is still there. It's not a lot of security but every bit helps.
Hmm, I think the market cut Commodore out of the market.
Actually I think you'll find that Commodore's management and marketing cut Commodore out of the market.
But back in the nineties, Microsoft was the proverbial 600 pound monkey. This is why they lost not one, but two, antitrust trials.
"Windows installation has never been shy about overwriting LILO (and later GRUB)..."
/boot partition for Linux. I may additionally write another instance of the stage one loader to the MBR for my convenience. But I'm not surprised if something else blows it away. If that happens, I set the primary partition to my Linux loader partition. That then boots fine, and I can then re-write my favored MBR.
For a rare change, this isn't Microsoft's fault. To the best of my knowledge, every "install" program for every version of DOS, Windows-as-an-OS, or OS/2 writes a new MBR (Maser Boot Record). The MBR was never, ever intended to contain an OS-specific boot loader. It contains the partition table, and the code to find the active partition and boot the PBR (Partition Boot Record). It has been that way since IBM and Microsoft created the IBM-PC hard disk MBR table format in the 1980's.
It is Linux (or rather, LILO, GRUB, and the like) that are doing something completely non-standard by installing application-specific software into the MBR. Granted, the IBM-PC platform is a collection of hacks and limitations, so doing something non-standard is often the only way to accomplish something, but that doesn't mean you can expect your non-standard approach to work for every situation.
When I install LILO or GRUB, I install it to the PBR of a primary partition, the way the PC spec says to. I usually use the same partition as my root and/or
Now, Microsoft could make things easier by updating their current (or next) installer to detect an existing MBR and offer the opportunity to leave it alone. Of course, questions like that would prolly just confuse the vast majority of their customer base. More importantly, Microsoft has shown over and over again that they're rather anti-social, so I would hardly expect them to go out of their way to support the non-standard behavior of their competition!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Just updating an old chestnut.
From TFA:
Disclaimer
* I work at Microsoft.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm slightly off-topic, but I'll post anywaya and risk the karma:
From TFA:
To me, this is a very interesting part of the article. On the FreeDOS Project we have recently had a thread about chasing MS-DOS compatibility. One side of the argument says that we should not be satisfied until we have implemented every quirk/feature of MS-DOS. Another side argues that as long as DOS applications that people use today work (for example, games and embedded systems) then we have done our job; we can implement any broken/missing stuff as it is discovered.
I've always considered myself on the "DOS should be a usable operating system, and we shouldn't be afraid to throw off 'crutches' that are no longer needed" side of the fence. When we wrote the FreeDOS Spec all those years ago, I deprecated some commands/programs because they were "crutches" to help applications written for earlier versions of DOS to run on newer versions of DOS. Other programs were reduced in scope, because the extra functionality really wasn't needed today (for example, DEFRAG was taken off the list, because so many freeware / shareware / commercial defraggers exist - or because many people run FreeDOS in a DOS emulator like VMWare or DOSemu, and defraggers aren't needed.)
Compatibility for the sake of supporting applications is good. Compatibility for the sake of compatibility is not necessarily good.
& a dev version of konqueror
(disclosure: i cross posted the above to the comments section in TFA)
Wallace and Erikson use an unnamed source. This makes it difficult to verify their anecdote. If their source is correct, however, it explains why so many people at Microsoft and Lotus have never heard of the story. Very few people were alleged to be in on the job.
As far as I know, Wallace and Erikson have generally proved to be reliable reporters with regard to this book. I've seen accusations that Hard Drive is a hatchet job. But, having read the book myself many years ago, I thought that it was fairly well balanced.
There is something a bit odd about how people use these office suites. Lotus were practically giving away their software at the end and still nobody would use it (I always thought AmiPro was massively superior to MS Word 2).
Right now you can get Open Office for nothing more than the cost of a dowload and a DVD but MS Office must be outstripping it in new installs by - whaddya reckon- somewhere in the region of 1000:1 to 100:1.
But what is it that people get out of MS Office that they don't get with the free/cheap alternatives? I'll bet 99.9% of users get nothing. Or think of it another way - if you have less than 1000 employees then nobody is going to benefit.
I love free software, but even my other half (who uses it all the time at home because it's all I install) prefers MS for some reason. Why??
So what if the Lotus 1-2-3 is bogus? it does not make MS any less guilty. Remember DR-DOS?
and this is a registered well known port.
"The difficulty of Libertarianism: not 'I must be free' but 'That other jerk must be free, as well'."
Why is that a difficulty?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Adam Barr doesn't just work for Microsoft; he works for their Bureau of Truth.
The difficulty of Libertarianism: not 'I must be free' but 'That other jerk must be free, as well'.
Why is that a difficulty?
Perhaps because Libertarianism is an insiduously politically correct way of referring to Feudalism, a system where people are permitted to "willingly" become serfs of others and the concept of economic coercion is Orwelled out. The actual difficulty of Libertarianism is not that 'I must be free to oppress others' but that 'That other jerk must be free to oppress me, as well'.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
So your assertion is that no Libertarian has the integrity to apply his own principles to himself?
I'm not a Libertarian, I'm a libertarian, but I still think you're tarring with a pretty broad brush...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
As far as I can tell one can still buy parts. If you're lazy and want someone else to put it together for ya, well, I guess you get Windows.
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My new Home
Most people easily see the "I must be free" part of Libertarianism. But if you present them with the idea that "That other jerk must be free, as well"... it takes a real self-assessment of your own concept of liberty. Do you actually believe it, when it applies to others?
(I'm not asking if you, Moofie, believe it. I'm suggesting that this question is the question with which a person would have to wrestle.)
I tend to hear people who say they are in favor of freedom, but act in favor of restriction. Well, freedom = good for themselves, but freedom = bad for others.
It is a difficulty, because people who self-assess honestly, may find out that they don't believe in freedom for others.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
That's not a problem with Libertarianism, that's a problem with people who lack integrity.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Duh!
I just came back from visiting my parents and having a conversation about my dad's problem: He wants to run 3 applications:
- Lotus 1-2-3 v3 for DOS
- Boekhoud (a __very old__ accounting package)
- WordPerfect 12
The problem is:
- Lotus runs in protected mode, crashes if it sees more as 16 Mb RAM.
- Boekhoud run's in real mode and crashes on anything faster as 200 Mhz.
- WP 12 needs loads of RAM a fast CPU and win98SE+
With a lot of tweaking he has all of it running on a 200Mhz with 64Mb RAM and 98SE, but all are a PITA to use, and the system can only run in 640x480.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
You're right, it's a shitty way to write an OS. Unfortunately, if MS "breaks" some program because the ISV used undocumented APIs or reserved fields who do you think gets blamed? If that program has enough users (like anything Adobe makes) then MS has to make a check to restore the broken behavior for the bad app.
Believe me, I understand the pressure on OS vendors to maintain compatibility. In the 70's, I was involved in the port of a turnkey CAD system to a new platform, and we had to bend over backwards to preserve every nuance that customer-written "plug-ins" had come to depend on over several years.
The difference, in my mind, is that we architected, over a period of several months, a solution that maintained the environment that customer-written code had come to depend on, down to the expectation that certain values would appear in certain locations in the address space; we called it "crock-for-crock compatibility." (I take no personal credit for the effort, BTW; I just followed instructions.)
By contrast, it seems to me that Microsoft tends to address these problems by exception: write the code, test, and when it breaks, patch it over with code that addresses the symptom. I know that's probably unfairly simplistic, but that's the impression I got from the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article.
I didn't like the word problem because of the emotional baggage that comes with that word. It conveys more blame and less hope. IMNSO, behind difficulty is more optimism.
"Houston, we have a problem."
"Houston, we have a difficulty." "What? The gum ball machine jammed?" ;-)
My two cents.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
OK, in that case Libertarianism doesn't have a "difficulty", people with no integrity have a "difficulty". And I think their difficulty is bigger than what political party they are a member of.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
My personal hope is that people tackle difficulty instead of shy away from it. :-)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"