Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson

avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."

Comments

Cairo vs NT/Cairo

[DreadSpoon]

This article has a confusing title, given that dominance of the Cairo graphics library these days.

Infamous indeed - spammer

[mccalli]

Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.

Daniel Eran. Just Say No.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Infamous indeed - spammer

[mccalli]

How do you know it is Mr. Eran posting those messages?

Because he states he is, has stated he is in replies and has taken part in email conversations with members of the group - see this thread for more details.

Cheers,
Ian

WTF

[Timesprout]

Article rambles all over the place, seems more to be pleading for reader to look at previous articles by author rather than make its higly convoluted point. Reads like a lot of sour grapes about historical irrelevance so I assume the author is just looking for hits by trying to be inflamatory.

Better Windows history here...

[Aphrika]

Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.

Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.

Re:Better Windows history here...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Actually, I'd suggest that you missed the author's point, entirely. Perhaps it is due to you not being in the position to buy the various products at the time, I don't know.

Here's the perspective. It has zero to do with "15 years later, we have a feature". It has *everything* to do with, "15 years ago, when we needed a solution, Microsoft said they would provide it in a TIMELY fashion." As a result, purchase decisions were directly impacted.

We needed a mutlitasking OS to replace a DG Mini. Windows 1.0 was reputed to provide this functionality.
We called them. "Multi tasking?" "Yes." "Multiple users?" "Absolutely."
We bought it.
They lied.
We called them back.
"The sales engineer was confused with the next version." End Quote.

The project was shelved.
CDOS, released by a company named "Digital Research", became viable.
The project was rehashed, but Windows 2.0 was out. It's DOS support had few caveats, compared to CDOS.
We called Microsoft.
"Multitasking?"
"Yep!"
"You said the other one was. It wasn't."
"We've totally rewritten it. It works for real."
"Multi user?"

We bought it.
They lied.
We called them back.
"It doesn't work."
"No? The NEXT one will, and it's due soon."

See the pattern yet?
We eventually bought CDOS (and later, CCDOS, a value-add version).

We also bought Win30. Hazard a guess why?
They lied, again.
We also bought Win31. THAT one was initially stated to be preemptive, remember? And the sales pigs all claimed it was, when it was time to sign the check. Perhaps you've forgotten the RAGING DEBATES over that very issue, at the time... "Preemptive!" "No, it isn't!" "Yes, it is!" "No, it isn't!"

Our project was fairly simple - run a couple of DOS boxes, and redirect STDIO to a serial port so that two people could run a program. This specific detail was explained to "Microsoft", EACH TIME.

Every time... EVERY time... the MS tactic was to stall our purchase of a competing, fully viable product, via the gross misrepresentation of their own.

The MS philosophy is, and has been, that it is better to ship an "empty box" on-time than to ship a working product a day late.
And they have done so, and I have the disks to prove it - Excel's initial "DMF" floppy distribution, who's lzexpand didn't comprehend DMF... they literally put the "standard" Win31 lzex onto disk 1. Funny, it's LZEx that needs to READ these FATless disks. It couldn't POSSIBLY work. But, the version they needed wasn't read yet, so... ship it! ...To NT BO4.5, which contained such setup.ini script error gems such as "Syntax error line xxx: ***REMEMBER TO FINISH SQL INSTALL SCRIPT". I'm NOT joking. And, you don't know the half of the extent of this.

Clearly, two "top tier" products at the time, and the installations not even been tested. Not once. NOT ONCE. And, the devs KNEW the crap wasn't finished. The Mgt KNEW the crap wasn't finished. Both cases, which were a year apart... the "official" MS reason for issuing new disks to me?

"Media Defect". Again, I am NOT joking. Both cases, no matter how hard I argued, the call takers flat out REFUSED to admit the actual flaw. "No, the media is perfect. The setups are WRONG. Syntax errors... referencing a directory path that doesn't exist on the CD... trivial little things like that..."

Because, you know, the standalone install disk for Exchange had the base directory in the root. On BO4.5, the base setup was a subdirectory. And the scripts hadn't been adapted for it.

Trivial, little things. Right? Or, an omnipresent pattern, that just keeps on recurring.

The point of the article is exactly correct; promise vaporware as a solution NOW, to prevent or stall the purchase of an existing solution, NOW. That they *might* actually deliver the vapor in five years? Irrelevent; I am NOT going to buy a "viable" solution today, when "nervana" is coming next week. I will wait, so that I can assess. Or worse, if the "vapor" is claimed to now exist,

Re:How else do you get a message out?

[johnw]

Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links? Nothing in the definition of Spam requires it to be commercial in nature. The term originated on Usenet and referred to the constant repetition of a message - as in the Monty Python Spam sketch. For a long time a distinction was made between Spam (repeated messages) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail). Alas, such a distinction is too subtle for your average journalist to comprehend so now the one term is used for both.

Damn, that was crap

[perrin]

Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.

Re:Damn, that was crap

[hedrick]

>despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001)
>before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same.

Win32 is an API, not an OS. Protected memory is an attribute of the OS, not the API. If we're talking about significant consumer implementations, the first serious implementation of win32 would be Windows 95. (Earlier ones were NT 3.51 and Win32s in Windows 3.1.) That's 1995.

The Mac equivalent to the win32 API would be Carbon. I agree that the first real protected mode implementation was 2001, with OS X, though I'm not convinced that anything before 10.2 was commercially significant. That's in 2002.

But that's still a long gap. While some had a different experience, during that gap I remember that every time my Mac staff wanted to show me something, their systems hung. I told them to come see me again when they had a real OS. Of course now they do, and I prefer it to XP/Vista.

Re:Damn, that was crap

[drsmithy]

Windows NT started from the OS/2 3.0 codebase which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM ... so Microsoft cannot receive full credits for it.

No, Windows NT *was* the OS/2 3.0 (ne: NT) codebase. Microsoft alone worked on OS/2 3.0, although by that time most of the work in OS/2 2.x was IBM's.

What went on to become OS/2 3.0 was a further development of OS/2 2.x by IBM, *not* the codebase that went on to become Windows NT. Even a cursory examination of their architectures should make it obvious that Windows NT and OS/2 have next to nothing in common.

IBM were still paying Microsoft royalties for their code in OS/2 *4.0*.

Windows 9x had pre-emtive multitasking for 32 bit applications, and cooperative multitasking for 16 bit applications, at least theoretically. And everyone here knows that Windows 9x provided real quality, especially Windows Millennium ;)

Relatively, it was competitive.

Mac OS Classic sucked, yes, but it was much better than Windows 9x which was replaced by Windows XP in late 2001.

Er, no. MacOS of the day couldn't hold a candle to Windows 9x in anything except UI (and even that is debatable). Windows NT utterly eclipsed it.

Re:Perfect Timing

[FrankNFurter]

Damn, I need to preview my posts.

They were NeXT.

Re:How else do you get a message out?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?

Why do you think SPAM implies commercial benefit? One of the earliest spammers was an 'evanglist' - sending out generic jesus-freak messages.

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[cnettel]

Win32 is not to Win16 what Win64 is to Win32. Win64 is a recompile, with a few typedefs changed and a few further changes where they were really needed.

Win32 contained lots of changes compared to Win16. Threads, overlapping I/O, lots of new controls, additions to GDI, long file names, pipes for IPC. It might seem like a joke, but access violations really had a greater chance of not taking the full machine down in Win95, versus Win 3.1.

And of course, a full driver model for all devices, with the Registry (yuck) to track the config. Yep, you could do anything in a VXD in 3.1, but there was no real structure to it. 32 bit disk I/O wasn't present in the original 3.1 either, so the difference is greater if we compare 3.1 versus 95, or the very last releases of 3.11 WfW versus 95.

Re:Perfect Timing

[TheRaven64]

NeXT was the company Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple. Their aim was to build the perfect computer, and many people believe they succeeded. Most who don't will concede that they came as close as was possible with the hardware of the time.

Some of their achievements include:

• An OS with a driver framework written in a dynamic, object-oriented language (Objective-C), making it very easy to write drivers for.
• The first Rapid Application Development system.
• The first web browser was written on one of their systems.
• A very powerful and flexible web development environment.
• EOF, a transparent object-relational mapping a decade or so before Ruby-on-Rails made the idea popular.

And lots of others. In the early '90s, they worked with Sun to create a standard to sit on top of POSIX and provide a portable way of writing GUI programs. Sun eventually dropped it, but the GNU project has an implementation, and it's the standard way of developing software on OS X (the latest version of the NeXT operating system, renamed after Apple bought NeXT).

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[TheRaven64]

Win32s was available for Windows 3.1. It exposed some win32 APIs to win16 developers, but not all of them. From the Wikipedia page:

Although ostensibly compatible with early versions of Windows NT, many functions were not implemented including threading and asynchronous I/O, newer serial port functions and many GDI extensions. This essentially limits it to applications specifically designed for the platform.