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.

Re:Cairo vs NT/Cairo

[6Yankee]

Even more confusing when you read it as "Vista vs. Casio", and look forward to a story about a digital watch being forced to run Vista and bursting into flames :(

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

[cloricus]

We don't have to; His server is already slashdotted!
 
Maybe he is still running an early 90s NT server?

NT

[DrSkwid]

NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i386 /s04_01.htm

4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .

NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
        The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .

Re:NT

[pla]

NT stand for Nested Task

Or, officially, "New Technology".

Or, the most likely of all, by analogy to IBM -> HAL (as in, HAL-9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), VMS -> W(indows)NT. I would normally consider that a cute coincidence, if they didn't share Dave Cutler as a lead designer on both projects.

But given that he did help design both OSs, and the propensity for geeks to come up with bizarrely convoluted acronyms, I'd call that the "right" answer as to the origins of the name "NT".

Re:NT

[diegocgteleline.es]

Sight. This topic. Again.

Just check the Windows NT wikipedia page, which links at page, where you can find this quote from one of the original NT creators:

"We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"

So please, stop all those theories, the origins of the name are well documented.

Re:How else do you get a message out?

[mccalli]

If an individual has a message they feel is important that they want to get out, I don't see an issue with posting a reference or two. Flooding a board is another story.

...and flooding is what's taking place. Yes, a post such as "here's a new and interesting Apple-related blog, please come and have a look" would have gone down fine. Instead we get every single article he writes for this blog being dumped as a rhetorical question into a group which specifically forbids advertising, and then he never engages in any discussion regarding it. The regulars of the group have all asked him to stop. He just totally disregards us.

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

Advertising revenue. He's abusing a community discussion group to take every opportunity to dump links to his advert revenue-driven blog. The group does not exist for his enrichment, as we say on there: uk.comp.sys.mac.adverts is thataway -->.

Cheers,
Ian

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,

Very Nice Link...

[bigdavesmith]

The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[johnw]

What did Windows 95 actually add? W95 actually followed on from W3.1 rather than W3.0. The main feature which it added (and the thing which drove Microsoft to release it) was incompatibility with OS/2. Because IBM had licensed access to the W3.1 source they were able to achieve first-rate compatibility for OS/2 running W3.1 programs, plus much better stability, multi-tasking etc. A crashing W3.1 program running on OS/2 simply took itself out rather than the whole system. Microsoft saw themselves potentially losing market share in a big way, so rushed W95 out.

This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.

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: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.

Bull... Once more for those who skipped class

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. It is leveraging the monopoly in an anti-competitive manner that is illegal.

Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.

But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.

And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.