Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video) • Hacker News Board

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#41

Post by malbs » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #12

God, the memories. I remember booting up Windows 95 for the first time -- I was so stoked. Everything was so new and smooth and perfect. Plus -- and this is the important thing -- PPP worked much, much better than 3.1 + trumpet winsock. Some time around 98SE I was dual booting into BeOS, which was so damn fast it wasn't funny. But it wasn't to be. And I remember browbeating Red Hat 3 into connecting to the internet a…

Well there was a fantastic feature of trumpet that windows lacked: If you had to reboot your computer (lol windows), the modem would remain connected, and trumpet could be re-enabled when the computer launched, you would be back up and running with internet, having not had to re-dial. Windows never did that, if you rebooted it was another phone call.

As far as Peter and Trumpet Software, they were based out of Hobart - After Windows implemented a default TCP/IP stack, much of his core business disappeared, they mucked around with building their own operating system for a while, turned Trumpet into an ISP, and in the end, his wife took him for most of what he had. Messy divorce/bankruptcy. Poor guy, he created a piece of software that I used for many years. For a long time, the trumpet implementation was better than the MS implementation, I still used it even when windows had built in PPP facilities.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#42

Post by moe » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

warfangle wrote: post #13

megaframe wrote: post #4

It's like taking every upgrade I've ever done with Windows and condensing it down to 9:49 (omit the various reinstalls)

I never used the upgrade option. I'd always get a new hard drive with my upgrade (to get OEM price) and install clean, usually using the original hard drive as a slave. The next cycle that hard drive would become an archive on the new slave. I have backed up files from 1996 on my home desktop.

Didn't everyone do it that way?

I tried the upgrade-option exactly once. I can't remember whether it preserved my background color. But I do remember that all sorts of drivers got screwed, software installs would fail with obscure error messages, and it generally was nothing but problems until I finally wiped and re-installed.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#43

Post by JonnieCache » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:00 AM UTC

badmonkey0001 wrote: post #33

jacques_chester wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea. We ought to set up a donation drive. edit: I was not being sarcastic. I wouldn't mind chipping a few bucks if a hat is going around.

I thought it a good idea. His name is Peter Tattam (I did some google-leg-work to find it). His site is at http://petertattam.com/ . I found his name via a report at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.40.... If this is the guy, what should we do? Should somebody ask him what he would like?

I would totally send him a few quid. I remember using it back in the day.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#44

Post by droz » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:02 AM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #37

pmsaue0 wrote: post #22

He applauds MS for continually supporting their legacy software... my opinion is that such legacy support is what continually hampers their rapid development

When it comes to viability as an infrastructure for business, downwards compatibility clearly trumps rapid development. The same can be seen with Java: having all the shiny, fashionable features the tech geek blogs are abuzz with may be nice... but having old, boring, clunky, uncool software that your business depends on continue to work is far, far more valuable.

I think this is an important point that most people forget. Most developers may be interested in doing the latest and greatest thing, but unless it can add value to an organization, then it is worthless.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#45

Post by _b8r0 » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:04 AM UTC

derleth wrote: post #32

jjordan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try running a 16-bit application on Windows x64...

> Try running a 16-bit application on Windows x64... There's no reason for this to fail: dosemu runs 16-bit code on 64-bit Linux systems just fine. You just need to do full hardware emulation which, at this point, is neither difficult nor prohibitively resource-intensive.

There's actually a very specific reason for it to fail. There's an unfixable bug in the way that the Windows emulates 16-bit BIOS calls in the 8086 mode monitor. This is specific to Microsoft's implementation and is (if I remember correctly) an architectural issue (and not the only one). The options are rewrite an emulator or ditch 16-bit support in 64-bit.

I'm not saying that this is the only reason, but it is one. Emulation/Virtualisation is different, but gets the support requirement off Microsoft's books.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#46

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:14 AM UTC

badmonkey0001 wrote: post #33

jacques_chester wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea. We ought to set up a donation drive. edit: I was not being sarcastic. I wouldn't mind chipping a few bucks if a hat is going around.

I thought it a good idea. His name is Peter Tattam (I did some google-leg-work to find it). His site is at http://petertattam.com/ . I found his name via a report at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.40.... If this is the guy, what should we do? Should somebody ask him what he would like?

His site seems to be down, but I found his company in the whitepages. I've left a message for him to call me back.

I'm going to suggest that he sets up a paypal account we can contribute to. I will also set up a website at lunch time, I think.

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#47

Post by someone_here » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:15 AM UTC

badmonkey0001 wrote: post #33

jacques_chester wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea. We ought to set up a donation drive. edit: I was not being sarcastic. I wouldn't mind chipping a few bucks if a hat is going around.

I thought it a good idea. His name is Peter Tattam (I did some google-leg-work to find it). His site is at http://petertattam.com/ . I found his name via a report at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.40.... If this is the guy, what should we do? Should somebody ask him what he would like?

It looks like his website is still running Trumpet Winsock...

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#48

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:39 AM UTC

billybob wrote: post #20

I had to turn that video off to maintain my personal pride. I may be a nerd, but by gosh, I do NOT watch Windows installation retrospectives for entertainment! :)

I wish I'd read this post earlier. I not only watched it but sent it to friends, never thinking that this actually might not be enjoyable to everyone.

Isn't there a conference somewhere that specializes in boring topics?

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#49

Post by imsky » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:40 AM UTC

Wow, 26 years condensed into 10 minutes...

Re: Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)

#50

Post by larsberg » Thu, Mar 03, 2011, 12:43 AM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #31

zdw wrote: post #2

This is a testament to how much trouble Microsoft goes through to maintain compatibility. I wonder whether malware from those early days would continue to run, or if newer versions of the OS would block it.

Much more than you would ever know.. The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated. In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating system allocate…

I also remember that there was a version of that rather than sending LVM_GETITEMTEXT would just read the ansi characters corresponding to the selected item during LVN_ITEMCHANGED off of a random location in the stack frame that they had "noticed" held the value. Of course, this eventually changed to a unicode string internally and broke WinZip... so the code that fired off this event would convert the unicode string to ansi and store a pointer in the stack.

I recall being very confused when I encountered this code many years after it had been implemented and had to spend a lot of time tracking through bug databases before discovering why the listview implementation was doing that.