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The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

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Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#21

Post by raverbashing »

M95D wrote: post #10

WinNT task manager is not the same as Win9x. I doubt it was "ported". In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: pr…

If I had to bet the reasons why would be that the 9x kernel was extremely frail and if you want to have any chance of Task Manager actually running it had to run from the start

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#22

Post by mjevans »

M95D wrote: post #20
rollcat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see any feasible way of re-fitting a modern OS with similar capability? It would likely require a lot of vertical integration between the kernel, display server, task manager, etc

Unfortunately, no. I belive it is first a conflict of policy: the USER needs to have more privileges than SYSTEM in order to suspend execution of all (including system's) processes. WinNT is a multi-user OS. Nobody would allow the user to DDoS the system, even when that user has direct access to the reset button. A second problem is that WinNT probably can't even open the Task Manager if some system processes are sus…

I miss the magic SysRq key... Xorg / graphical systems blocked it decades ago, I've forgotten how to invoke it without looking it up, though I do remember REISUB.

The security perspective of the SysRq commands is: a human is on a hard-wired console. If they want they can pull the power or press buttons on the outside of the PC that aren't on the keyboard. It's probably OK to obey some small list of actions that are useful when the rest of the system might be unresponsive.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#23

Post by badlibrarian »

Kwpolska wrote: post #8

This claim was so easy to verify with a Windows NT 4 ISO and a resource editor, but nobody did. And nobody thought the bitmap has much better font rendering than NT 4. Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8

"In 2006, Plummer's SoftwareOnline.com company was sued by The Washington State Attorney General’s Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called Registry Cleaner and InternetShield"

People at this site are notoriously anti-Windows. We love to talk about dark patterns. Those products were total bullshit built to scare people, leveraging knowledge of Windows internals garnered as a junior programmer who ported code that drew fonts and lines on the screen. And now he's overstating even that.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#24

Post by jeroenhd »

> "[..] I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally, but it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written, and didn't use it [..]"

I wonder if there are any leaked Win95 betas that can show the different approaches. I can imagine that a static bitmap would've been much faster and less memory intensive, something quite important when you're targeting computers with 8MB of RAM.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#25

Post by column »

withinrafael wrote: post #17

The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

haters gonna hate...

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#26

Post by M95D »

raverbashing wrote: post #21
M95D wrote: post #10

WinNT task manager is not the same as Win9x. I doubt it was "ported". In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: pr…

If I had to bet the reasons why would be that the 9x kernel was extremely frail and if you want to have any chance of Task Manager actually running it had to run from the start

That can't be the reason. If the kernel crashes (or a driver, 'cause it's all the same in Win9x), then there's an instant BSOD, so there won't be any Task Manager, even if it's already loaded in memory.

I belive that's the way thing were done in those days. In Win95 the Start Menu was also in memory, with the entire menu tree, progam names, icons, and everything. It would open instantly. In Win98 they changed that. It would read the .lnk files form disk (or cache) every time it openend. But it added drag&drop editing! And IE integration. And Active Desktop. And web content in Explorer folders.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#27

Post by bc_programming »

bilekas wrote: post #9
Kwpolska wrote: post #8

This claim was so easy to verify with a Windows NT 4 ISO and a resource editor, but nobody did. And nobody thought the bitmap has much better font rendering than NT 4. Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8

Not sure why it's related what he did after leaving Microsoft but okay, the article clearly states that he said the were using it internally at least and doesn't know why the programmatic sideways text was taken out but that everything else he touched on was right. It seems you have an opinion on Dave and that's fine but unrelated to the article here.

It's related because that past suggests a history of being untrustworthy. I mean we're talking about running a company that literally stole money from people and intentionally infected peoples computers to try to trick them into giving you more money, not just something he did by accident one weekend but something he dedicated years of his life to. Him leaning heavily on how he worked at a company two decades ago doesn't help. Other than the scam company shut down by washington state, what has he done since?

As for the particular claim regarding the start menu, What he actually claimed is that his implementation was removed in production builds. However, at the same time, there's no evidence of it in any of the various Beta and release candidate versions of NT4. Not only that, but prior to the NT4 betas, it was effectively the NT 3.51 "Desktop Shell Update" and none of the releases of that have his claimed implementation. So when and where is it?

He states "I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally". The issue is that there really was no "NT4 beta" at that point in time, nor any start menu in NT to add his rotated text code to. It was only around the start of 1994 that what would be known as the Taskbar and Start Menu really appeared in Chicago milestones- we know he isn't referring to those, since 9x didn't support the needed LOGFONT structures. What would become the start menu on Windows NT only appeared with the "Newshell" project which was preview software that you installed on NT 3.51 to add the Windows 95 enhanced shell. originally a desktop update for Windows NT 3.51 which started around the time of 95's release in, well, 1995. There's no evidence of his special code there- in fact the NT 3.51 Desktop Shell Update previews all used a bitmap.

And you might think, ahh, hew must mean before that, but the rotation feature in question, I believe, was new to NT4 altogether- so it would presumably have appeared somewhere during the betas.

The problem with his claims seems to be that evidence never seems particular forthcoming. When new information comes out he retracts claims and re-titles videos in order to move his claim into "gaps" where his claims are less falsifiable.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#28

Post by robertlagrant »

withinrafael wrote: post #17

The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

He addresses this in the pinned comment:

> UPDATE: This only shipped in the NTSUR release, as far as I can now tell. I've confirmed with team members that I'm not crazy, I did write and we did ship the code I describe in this episode, but it was ultimately replaced circa NT4 with bitmaps!

I don't know what's true, but it seems odd to not mention that.

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#29

Post by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t »

withinrafael wrote: post #17

The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

You do realize that in corporations such as Microsoft, multiple people work on the same code, and code gets rewritten all the time, right?

Dave Plummer cannot know about any changes after he left the company.

You seem to be not aware of that.

Also I don't know about you, but I don't know shit about the code I wrote two weeks ago. How do you expect someone to remember all details about code he wrote more than 25 years ago?

Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

#30

Post by lloydatkinson »

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote: post #29
withinrafael wrote: post #17

The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

You do realize that in corporations such as Microsoft, multiple people work on the same code, and code gets rewritten all the time, right? Dave Plummer cannot know about any changes after he left the company. You seem to be not aware of that. Also I don't know about you, but I don't know shit about the code I wrote two weeks ago. How do you expect someone to remember all details about code he wrote more than 25 years…

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