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How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.

Hmm. Not sure I agree. The initial CLR for .net was in vss. Maybe it wasn’t important, but bonus points if you know why.

No definitely not true. It was in Source Depot if not SLM.

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#12

Really wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel

Did you try it?

I can't immediately see why explorer.exe wouldn't run and give you a start menu

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#14
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.

The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#15

moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge. The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.

Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#16

moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge. The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.

As a comparison, CVS is from 1990, SVN from 2000 (and RCS from 82)

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#18
It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.

Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".

My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.

Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

#19

Really wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel

You still can. Run any program in compatibility mode; the Windows 2000 boxy UI is still there. As is the Windows Vista Aero Basic theme.

Like I always say, the user-mode of Windows is easiest to change, that's why it has been done almost every version.

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