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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?

#21

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

userbinator wrote: post #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.

Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.

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

#22

Post by AlecSchueler »

sho_hn wrote: post #15
userbinator wrote: post #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.

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.

Time started moving faster after smartphones began to steal our reflective moments.

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

#23

Post by raverbashing »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #21
userbinator wrote: post #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.

Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.

Funnily enough the Linux Kernel still use patches (and of course Git has helpers to create and import patches)

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

#24

Post by Someone »

userbinator wrote: post #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.

You don’t need git to get something “as simple as a git merge” (Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3)

Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3), so three-way merges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(version_control)#Three-...) predate git by decades.

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

#25

Post by darkwater »

sho_hn wrote: post #15
userbinator wrote: post #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.

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.

I don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)

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

#26

Post by kleiba »

userbinator wrote: post #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.

> this manual process was largely automated

Priceless.

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

#27

Post by txdv »

userbinator wrote: post #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.

maybe merging patch files was a thing way before git?

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

#28

Post by [deleted] »

nolok wrote: post #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 th…

[deleted]

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

#30

Post by keyle »

userbinator wrote: post #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.

Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
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