The GUI's may be good enough, but we still have work to do on the speech recognition and visual recognition fronts.
Ultimately GUIs will be thought as, as something that is just there, the primary form of input will be a hybrid of Touch, Speech, and the computer understanding facial expressions.
That is why MSR has so many projects open for alternate human to computer interfaces, and why speech recognition improvements what been increasing in Windows for the last few versions. Multi-touch going in for Windows 7. It wouldn't surprise me to find some of the facial recognition stuff making it in after that.
When IBM and MS were talking about the future of OSs' both knew 16-bit code was at an end, so they decided that something new was in order, it needed to support DOS and Posix since the government just mandated that new systems had to support Posix.
IBM was in the middle of the OS/2 2.x ship cycle and didnâ(TM)t want to distract too many of their engineers with a new project just yet, so they handed off the new kernel design to MS.
DEC at the time was being DEC and canceled DaveCâ(TM)s project called Prisim. DaveC gave his team a month or so off before letting them go. BillG caught wind of the project being cancelled and invited DaveC to a meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting BillG agreed to pick-up DaveC and his team including the hardware guys to design the next generation kernel that OS/2 3.x was to be based.
For the next year the software guys spent their time designing the new kernel and the hardware guys were designing the new hardware (MIPS) that would run the new kernel. DaveC wanted to ensure that the kernel was portable and wanted to use the systems as a forcing function to make sure the devs didnâ(TM)t start using inline assembly.
NT has more in common with the VAX OS than with OS/2 1.x+.
Bottom line here is that MS designed the NT kernel and all they had to do was provide subsystems for running OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Posix, and DOS applications, when they parted company MS dropped OS/2 2.x and added the Win16 and Win32 subsystems.
He also has a very engaging style of management. Instead of leading from afar he would hold weekly team meetings where he would give everybody the projects status, address concerns, and then kick off the festivities with clips from the weekly world news. The comedy skits he and Ian MacDonald would do were pretty funny most of the time.
He projects the work hard play hard mentality. He always kept the team meetings stocked with several kegs of beer and always told the employees that if they drank too much take a cab home and expense it.
I would say he was my favorite higher level manager at Microsoft.
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The GUI's may be good enough, but we still have work to do on the speech recognition and visual recognition fronts.
Ultimately GUIs will be thought as, as something that is just there, the primary form of input will be a hybrid of Touch, Speech, and the computer understanding facial expressions.
That is why MSR has so many projects open for alternate human to computer interfaces, and why speech recognition improvements what been increasing in Windows for the last few versions. Multi-touch going in for Windows 7. It wouldn't surprise me to find some of the facial recognition stuff making it in after that.
When IBM and MS were talking about the future of OSs' both knew 16-bit code was at an end, so they decided that something new was in order, it needed to support DOS and Posix since the government just mandated that new systems had to support Posix.
IBM was in the middle of the OS/2 2.x ship cycle and didnâ(TM)t want to distract too many of their engineers with a new project just yet, so they handed off the new kernel design to MS.
DEC at the time was being DEC and canceled DaveCâ(TM)s project called Prisim. DaveC gave his team a month or so off before letting them go. BillG caught wind of the project being cancelled and invited DaveC to a meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting BillG agreed to pick-up DaveC and his team including the hardware guys to design the next generation kernel that OS/2 3.x was to be based.
For the next year the software guys spent their time designing the new kernel and the hardware guys were designing the new hardware (MIPS) that would run the new kernel. DaveC wanted to ensure that the kernel was portable and wanted to use the systems as a forcing function to make sure the devs didnâ(TM)t start using inline assembly.
The original kernel design doc can be seen here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=124
I had fun at the party MS threw when the Smithsonian wanted the design doc.
NT has more in common with the VAX OS than with OS/2 1.x+.
Bottom line here is that MS designed the NT kernel and all they had to do was provide subsystems for running OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Posix, and DOS applications, when they parted company MS dropped OS/2 2.x and added the Win16 and Win32 subsystems.
----- Rom
Good references for NT history are:
Inside Wndows NT by Helen Custer
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Network-CUSTER/dp/155615481X
Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207943287&sr=1-2
He also has a very engaging style of management. Instead of leading from afar he would hold weekly team meetings where he would give everybody the projects status, address concerns, and then kick off the festivities with clips from the weekly world news. The comedy skits he and Ian MacDonald would do were pretty funny most of the time.
He projects the work hard play hard mentality. He always kept the team meetings stocked with several kegs of beer and always told the employees that if they drank too much take a cab home and expense it.
I would say he was my favorite higher level manager at Microsoft.
----- Rom