So that's why everyone uses NTFS...
“I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#22Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#23To be honest I can't afford to commute and do nothing, I have to plan new features for my products, redesign existing ones, or at least read a tech book/article, otherwise I feel really frustrated because I dislike to stay still.
The best ideas I have ever had happened during my commute, so I feel familiar with the "I wrote FAT on an airplane" statement.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#24From 12BitSlab in article's comments
> I don't mind if billg gets a little arrogant at times. One merely has to look at how he wrote the ROM code for the Altair to realize his abilities.
> Also, ALL of the concepts embodied in modern tablets and smartphones were "invented" by billg when he wrote the code for the Tandy 100. Things like "instant on", data stored in non-volitile memory, small productivity apps, continue from the same point after power down, etc. Persoannly, I put billg in the Top 5 of all-time CS people who contributed to computing.
This is an interesting claim, I was always under the impression that while Gates could code, he wasn't at all a CS giant.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#25I think the real lesson here is that every time you add a feature, you are adding development overhead to every other feature, leading to exponential development time. I'm sure if segment tuning was one of the first thing to go into windows, it would have been much simpler to implement. However, at later stages in the development you have to account for how different, already-written applications are loading their me…
Another possible conclusion from your analysis is that a proper architectural separation of concerns (which could allow one to bang out code like he's still on that plane) has not been practiced in Windows, and by the time Bill was offered the opportunity to code something in Windows it was already hopelessly entangled.
Not exactly. I am a huge fan of code modularization, but what modularization offers you is the ability to decrease the exponent (i.e. to be devTime^1.01 instead of devTime^2). Some features though (including segment tuning, from the sound of it), will touch a ton of other features regardless of how well you modularize your code.
I work at a networking company (Arista), and a lot of the interesting problems come from this sort of interaction. Our entire OS was built so an agent would be resilient to changes in another agent, and this modularization means there is very little "spaghetti code". However, when you are building a feature (say, a new routing protocol), you have to be extremely conscious of how it interacts with everything else: various reliability features (i.e. Stateful switchovers), configuration features (saved configs, public APIs), resource contention (TCAM utilization), etc. etc. If that new routing protocol was the first thing we implemented on our switch, it would be a complete breeze. In the context of other features though, this becomes a more intensive project (though in codebases without proper modularization you'd find this task "herculean" as opposed to "intensive").
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#26So the FAT story may be an exaggeration, but does Brandon Eich's Javascript-in-10-days ( http://www.quora.com/JavaScript/In-which-10-days-of-May-did-... ) still count as a "STFU-I'm-the-boss" feat?
You have a typo: Brandon Eich -> Brendan Eich. Not nitpicking, am compelled to point out since it is a name.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#27Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#28Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#29If he'd kept one foot in the codebase - he might not have made so much money - but his software legacy might have turned out differently.
I'm not sure that Microsoft's is a bad legacy. They did a whole hell of a lot to put programming and office tools in the hands of normal people.
Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”
#30I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....
According to this, Gates did some of the design, but Marc McDonald, employee #1 at MS, helped with the design, and did the coding in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Original_... Like a lot of old stories remembered after-the-fact to make a point, it seems that the truth is more complicated.
Thanks for pointing this out. It's all too common to overlook employee contributions to projects.