Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

computernewb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–65 of 65 posts

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#61

Post by bombcar »

anthk wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).

Not with Borland products. Even XEmacs and Emacs had these features (code control was with CVS or close).

CVS and RCS and friends were infants; barely more than copying directories or zip files around.

Complex merging as we're used to with git was unheard of.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#62

Post by JdeBP »

Eisenstein wrote: post #35

I particularly like this bit in ntdesrtl.pdf: "6.1 OS/2 Standards Our initial OS/2 API set centers around the evolving 32-bit Cruiser, or OS/2 2.0 API set. (The design of Cruiser APIs is being done in parallel with the NT OS/2 design.) In some respects, this standard is harder to deal with than the POSIX standards. OS/2 is tied to the Intel x86 architecture and these dependencies show up in a number of APIs. Given th…

And also not entirely correct. The 16-bit 1.x API was definitely x86-specific. But the 32-bit 2.x API was not, as evidenced by OS/2 for PowerPC actually existing at one point.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#63

Post by pdw »

themafia wrote: post #8

So.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS? If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.

In the early 90s Microsoft distributed the full Win32 API documentation as a WinHelp file. It felt very much as hyperlinked man-pages. Super fast too, even on machines of the time. WIN32.HLP can still be easily found, but modern Windows versions no longer ship WinHelp :(

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#64

Post by canucker2016 »

Looking at the authours of the design workbook, I note that there's a college intern in the list.

Who says college interns don't do real work?

I remember when he told several other interns that they had got "Hello World" to run on the nascent Windows NT.

Re: Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

#65

Post by lproven »

markus_zhang wrote: post #55
lproven wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are several, some based on leaked source, such as this:

https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

I wrote about some here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_runn...

Post reply on HN