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Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

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Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#101

Post by __david__ »

redthrowaway wrote: post #86

When people wonder why Windows is so big and seemingly complex, and why it still uses stupid things like a registry, this is why. Microsoft deserves accolades for maintaining compatibility on this scale, while still working on just about any combination of hardware under the sun. I'm sure they would have loved to be able to do what Apple did with OSX, but there are things you can pull off with 3% market share that ar…

To be fair, the original OS X was pretty backwards compatible--they ran OS 9 stuff in a virtual environment much like Windows 7 runs its older stuff. The Intel transition is the first time that Apple has been so lax about backwards compatibility. They dropped Classic on Intel Macs and they're about to drop PowerPC compatibility. It's a shame--I have OS 9 Games I would love to run on my MacBook Pro. Not to mention all the old programs I wrote.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#102

Post by redthrowaway »

__david__ wrote: post #101
redthrowaway wrote: post #86

When people wonder why Windows is so big and seemingly complex, and why it still uses stupid things like a registry, this is why. Microsoft deserves accolades for maintaining compatibility on this scale, while still working on just about any combination of hardware under the sun. I'm sure they would have loved to be able to do what Apple did with OSX, but there are things you can pull off with 3% market share that ar…

To be fair, the original OS X was pretty backwards compatible--they ran OS 9 stuff in a virtual environment much like Windows 7 runs its older stuff. The Intel transition is the first time that Apple has been so lax about backwards compatibility. They dropped Classic on Intel Macs and they're about to drop PowerPC compatibility. It's a shame--I have OS 9 Games I would love to run on my MacBook Pro. Not to mention all…

Right, but Apple didn't have to worry about the thousands of corporate clients running Enterprise software that relied upon some specific API calls to handle billions of dollars in business. When Apple says, "too bad, upgrade", their customers mostly just do so. If Microsoft were to take that approach, they'd lose billions in revenue.

My point, however, wasn't really that OSX isn't backward-compatible, but rather that I'm sure there aren't many engineers at Microsoft who wouldn't love to throw out the whole Windows paradigm and build something new and better from scratch. Hell, I bet BillG himself would have loved to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish *nix. I think people have a tendency to view Windows' rather bloated codebase and adherence to outdated architecture as a failure of imagination on the part of its programmers, whereas it's really just a practicality necessitated by their user base.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#103

Post by mcritz »

redthrowaway wrote: post #86

When people wonder why Windows is so big and seemingly complex, and why it still uses stupid things like a registry, this is why. Microsoft deserves accolades for maintaining compatibility on this scale, while still working on just about any combination of hardware under the sun. I'm sure they would have loved to be able to do what Apple did with OSX, but there are things you can pull off with 3% market share that ar…

Can someone help me understand the Vista upgrade? For many users the “clean install” (where it deleted everything prior to upgrading) was the only option available.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#104

Post by larsberg »

StavrosK wrote: post #53
larsberg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also remember that there was a version of that rather than sending LVM_GETITEMTEXT would just read the ansi characters corresponding to the selected item during LVN_ITEMCHANGED off of a random location in the stack frame that they had "noticed" held the value. Of course, this eventually changed to a unicode string internally and broke WinZip... so the code that fired off this event would convert the unicode string…

I found it amusing how you avoided to mention the name initially only to lapse (I'm assuming it wasn't intentional) and inadvertently say it was WinZip later on.

Whoops! Yeah, I'd had WinZip in there originally, then I couldn't remember if this particular story had already come out. I've been gone from MSFT for a long time, but it was generally considered bad form when I was there to call out specific products publicly for their bad code.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#106

Post by tomlin »

jacques_chester wrote: post #12

God, the memories. I remember booting up Windows 95 for the first time -- I was so stoked. Everything was so new and smooth and perfect. Plus -- and this is the important thing -- PPP worked much, much better than 3.1 + trumpet winsock. Some time around 98SE I was dual booting into BeOS, which was so damn fast it wasn't funny. But it wasn't to be. And I remember browbeating Red Hat 3 into connecting to the internet a…

Bought my first PC, an IBM 486DX-100. Preloaded Win95 display drivers were failing, so after a quick call to IBM I was instructed to download the newer drivers from the IBM Support BBS. After installing the drivers and a reboot, "Starting Windows95 For The First Time..." became my vision of terror. I remember watching the sliding bar on the bottom hoping that it wouldn't stop moving for too long.

The support tech I dealt with was super helpful but was confused by the mounting calls on the issue so after a few days he investigated and found that the BBS files were infected with the Monkey.3 MBR virus. The cool thing was that he called me directly and let me know the source of the problem and apologized on behalf of IBM.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#107

Post by IDisposableHero »

redthrowaway wrote: post #102
__david__ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the original OS X was pretty backwards compatible--they ran OS 9 stuff in a virtual environment much like Windows 7 runs its older stuff. The Intel transition is the first time that Apple has been so lax about backwards compatibility. They dropped Classic on Intel Macs and they're about to drop PowerPC compatibility. It's a shame--I have OS 9 Games I would love to run on my MacBook Pro. Not to mention all…

Right, but Apple didn't have to worry about the thousands of corporate clients running Enterprise software that relied upon some specific API calls to handle billions of dollars in business. When Apple says, "too bad, upgrade", their customers mostly just do so. If Microsoft were to take that approach, they'd lose billions in revenue. My point, however, wasn't really that OSX isn't backward-compatible, but rather tha…

I'm sure there aren't many engineers at Microsoft who wouldn't love to throw out the whole Windows paradigm and build something new and better from scratch.

They kinda did. When Windows 3.1 was a hit, the server OS was Windows NT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT ) NT = New Technology.

Windows 95, 98 and Me are evolutions of the Windows 3.1 codebase, and then mercifully died. NT begat Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7

You can see that they changed a lot of OS internals for the better (writing C++ code on win 3.1 it's trivial to lock up the whole OS, NT didn't have that issue), and then worked hard for compatibility.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#108

Post by tibbon »

jessedhillon wrote: post #23
shii wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do it with this level of preciseness in the Mac family at least. Between OS X, probably as long as you're not on non-intel processors. Like other commenter said, Windows/MS really goes all the way for backwards compatibility.

You can take a G3 from Mac OS 7.1.2 (version which added PowerPC support) all the way to 10.4, which would take you from 1997 to 2005. I haven't done it, but I've read that getting 10.4 requires some finagling to achieve, so the last supported install you could do would be 10.3.9

Wonder if you could upgrade them, and then just rip out the hard drive and move it to another box. Wondering if 10.4 would be ok with one moment having a PPC and another moment having an intel processor.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#109

Post by Sherlock »

potatolicious wrote: post #5

Impressive, but I have to wonder how many compromises had to be made, and advancements abandoned, to keep apps like Reversi and Dosshell all the way up through Win7...

There is a lot of people with the "if it works, don't touch it" mentality. MS would have sold a lot less if they had broke backwards compatibility.

It took me some years to internalize the benefits of "if it works, don't touch it", and I currently apply to a lot of home maintenance problems, which are outside my area of expertise.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#110

Post by brudgers »

bengl3rt wrote: post #63

No Windows ME? ;-)

And more importantly no Windows NT.

This would have been the proper predecessor for Windows 2000 Professional.

Windows 2000 Professional was not part of consumer upgrade path - ME was.

Of course XP was was the successor to both.

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