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Microsoft Had Doubts About the 'Vista Capable' Label
dionysus writes "Last April, Microsoft was sued over its 'Vista Capable' labeling, and in hearing last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented evidence that Microsoft employees were skeptical about the 'Vista Capable' marketing. Some of the most damning evidence comes from Microsoft executives: 'Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."' The judge in the case is currently considering the plaintiffs' request to make it a class-action lawsuit."
I really didn't think there would be any interest in the actual history of the doggerel, but these posts are proving me wrong. This is what I remember:
The phrase first came into vogue in the early days of Windows 95.
Windows is a 32-bit shell references the structure of the first release of Win95, when MS was supporting continued use of some DOS based 3rd party software. At that time, they still had to support products from Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, and AutoCAD to be viable in the business market.
for a 16-bit extension a reference to the 16 bit API which was still in the core of Win95. Much of this was written in 8086 assembly language (16 bit operations), which is a superset of the 8080 assembly language (8 bit operations).
to an 8-bit operating system the boot loader, and initially most of the DOS, was 8080 code carried in, I believe, because this was the only way to provide compatibility for legacy DOS applications that had been running on Win3.x (breaking custom GWBasic programs that had been written before Windows would have pissed off the VARs-- who were an important part of Ballmer's "Developers"). In those early years, most of us regarded the book Undocumented DOS as a necessary bible: to make things work, we often had to call internal DOS routines directly.
designed for a 4-bit microprocessor the 8080 that launched the whole IBM PC industry was an extension of the 4004 calculator chip that Intel developed in the early 1970s
by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. These phrases need no further elucidation.
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What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I thought the old sig was pretty good. Say, you might be the person who could answer this for me (it's a question that's been bugging me for about 30 long seconds since I came across it here )
What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
Oh, never mind. I just found the answer: You can't cross a vector with a scalar.