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Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

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Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#51

Post by lproven »

torginus wrote: post #44
p_ing wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's eye wasn't on open sourcing their OS and describing the deep internals. They still don't want you to develop against the NT API, even though developers certainly do (and Microsoft makes compatibility shims for applications which do, when required).

Tbh, I think Windows' stable ABI/API at all levels + excellent docs is something the open source community could learn from. Software that is poorly documented, has no stable api, and no way of accepting extensions other than modifying the source, is not very 'free', in the sense, that if I have a good idea, I'll have crazy amounts of trouble getting the change to users even if I manage to decipher and modify the sou…

> If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine

This goes back a very long time -- at least to the Windows 3.0 timeframe.

The IBM-only 32-bit OS/2 2.0 came out around the same time as Windows 3.1.

OS/2 2 could run Windows 3 inside what was effectively a VM (a decade before true VMs came to the x86 platform), running the Microsoft code on top of OS/2's built-in DOS emulator.

I remember an IBM person objecting to a journalist saying "so you have access to the Windows source code, and you patch it to run under OS/2?"

Reportedly, the IBM engineer looked a bit pained and said "we don't patch it -- we superclass it in memory to make it a good citizen, well-behaved inside OS/2's protected mode."

(It is over 30Y ago so forgive me if I am not verbatim.)

This was subsequently demonstrated to be true rather than a marketing claim. OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 included a "WinOS2" environment. OS/2 Warp 3 made this an option: it was sold in 2 versions, one with a blue box which contained a Windows 3.1 environment, and one with a red box which did not contain WinOS2 but could be installed on top of an existing Windows 3.1 system and then took over the entire Windows environment, complete with all your installed apps, and ran that inside OS/2.

So you kept all your installed 16-bit apps and settings but got a new 32-bit OS with full memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking as well.

Bear in mind that Windows has not activation mechanism then, so you could copy a complete Windows 3.x installation onto a new PC, change some drivers and it just worked without complaint.

So you could buy a new high-end 486 PC, copy Windows off your old 386, install OS/2 Warp over the top and have a whole new OS with all your apps and their files still running.

This was amazingly radical stuff in the first half of the 1990s.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#52

Post by markus_zhang »

saratogacx wrote: post #38
themafia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was MSDN always free? I remember their access prices for the services in the late 90s and early 00s were eyewatering.

If I recall, MSDN was super expensive but that is because it included non-commercial licenses for just about everything Microsoft shipped as well as getting hard copies of the documentation and a bunch of other stuff. If you just wanted to do c++ windows programming you can get visual studio which, I believe, did come with Win32 documentation (especially as CD roms became common distro methods). The c++ software deve…

Eh, just found this by a random search:

https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/d/16d24ada-5317-...

5,000+ pages...I think this is the FULL documentation for everything related to VB 2005.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#53

Post by Borg3 »

bombcar wrote: post #25
markus_zhang wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Windows and DOS do have good documents. I actually think they had way better ones than Linux at the time. But I could be wrong. For reference: https://jacobfilipp.com/msj-index/ And also MSDN.

Windows programming guides provided by Microsoft were simply amazing for the time; the documentation available was excellent. Part of the reason they did so well, companies could easily implement software using the new APIs. Of course, they also had secret and undocumented APIs that people found and wanted to use ...

This and great backward compatibility. I still can make app targeting Win2000 and it will run on Win2000 onwards (Win10 and Win11 included.) Unfortunately, its starts to fall apart...

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#54

Post by markus_zhang »

Borg3 wrote: post #53
bombcar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows programming guides provided by Microsoft were simply amazing for the time; the documentation available was excellent. Part of the reason they did so well, companies could easily implement software using the new APIs. Of course, they also had secret and undocumented APIs that people found and wanted to use ...

This and great backward compatibility. I still can make app targeting Win2000 and it will run on Win2000 onwards (Win10 and Win11 included.) Unfortunately, its starts to fall apart...

I guess they finally think they captured enough "value" with Windows so there is no need to keep every subsystem maintained. It must be very expensive to keep a 20+ year developer to sit in a basement room writing code for some feature that does not generate much revenue. Sad truth. TBH I'd love to learn those subsystems and do it for free.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#55

Post by markus_zhang »

lproven wrote: post #51
torginus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, I think Windows' stable ABI/API at all levels + excellent docs is something the open source community could learn from. Software that is poorly documented, has no stable api, and no way of accepting extensions other than modifying the source, is not very 'free', in the sense, that if I have a good idea, I'll have crazy amounts of trouble getting the change to users even if I manage to decipher and modify the sou…

> If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine This goes back a very long time -- at least to the Windows 3.0 timeframe. The IBM-only 32-bit OS/2 2.0 came out around the same time as Windows 3.1. OS/2 2 could run Windows 3 inside what was effectively a VM (a decade before true VMs came to the x86 platform), running the Microsoft code on top…

They invested huge amount of resources to make sure it is backward compatible in NT, to the disagreement of David Cutler. There is a NTVDM extended with WoW for Windows 16-bit, AFAIK. I have a copy of leaked source code of NT 3.5 but I'm not good enough to understand the code. Also probably modern VMs such as DOSBOX do a better job emulating 16-bit stuffs.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#57

Post by skissane »

rbanffy wrote: post #43
s1gsegv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are an awful lot of iOS and macOS devices out there

I still think Macs outnumber IBM mainframe and POWER machines by a couple orders of magnitude.

By unit count, no question.

By revenue? Genuinely uncertain.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#58

Post by markus_zhang »

hulitu wrote: post #56

Windows NT had a design ? It all looks like a bunch of staff thrown at a wall in the hope that it will stick.

The core NT team came from DEC and was considered as the "adults" in the whole organization. It's definitely much more organized than DOS/Win 3.X back then.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#59

Post by jaen »

hulitu wrote: post #56

Windows NT had a design ? It all looks like a bunch of staff thrown at a wall in the hope that it will stick.

I'm very curious about what you consider a real "design" then?!

The Windows NT kernel had a better design than most contemporary and succeeding operating systems (including the various Unixes, Linux, BSD, plan9 etc.).

Modern kernel designs like Google's Fuchsia have more in common with NT than POSIX/Unix/Linux.

In particular, the NT object manager approach subsumes the Unix "everything is a file, well, not quite, oh... uhh.. let us slowly fix that by adding stuff like signalfd, memfd, pidfd etc. ahh hmm, these still do not exactly fit into a FS mold... ah crap, still missing a proper ptrace FS analogue" design approach that eg. Linux has taken in the last two decades.

It also had powerful primitives like eg. APCs that could be used to build higher-level kernel features elegantly.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#60

Post by rerdavies »

themafia wrote: post #26
markus_zhang wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Windows and DOS do have good documents. I actually think they had way better ones than Linux at the time. But I could be wrong. For reference: https://jacobfilipp.com/msj-index/ And also MSDN.

Was MSDN always free? I remember their access prices for the services in the late 90s and early 00s were eyewatering.

Eye-watering perhaps, but not unreasonably for what you got. Although the top-tier Enterprise editions truly were eye-wateringly expensive, and provided nothing compellingly useful that wasn't available in entry-level or mid-tier MSDN subscriptions.

My preference was for a mid-tier subscription that provided a complete set of licensed-for-development-use Windows Server, and Microsoft Office and SQL Server ISOs, for ~$495/year.

Of course, you had no way of knowing that the truly eye-watering top-tier $2000/yr MSDN subscriptions were jam-packed with junky "Enterprise" tools that you would never actually want or need, without actually purchasing one. Nor would you know that the priority support credits bundled with top-tier MSDN support did not materially improve upon the "shouting into the void" nature of unpaid support, which in turn was not materially better than the No Support At All for U option that we currently have. Although my one experience with a paid priority support case did actually produce an actual fix three years later. So there is that, I suppose. :-/

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