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Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

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Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#91

Post by jabroni_salad »

distcs wrote: post #30
LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

> Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days. If you were doing anything complex (programming, editing pictures, ...) Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often. If anything, the core of the Windows operating system has only gotten better with time. Yes, they keep adding fluff…

I'm honestly not sure if that was windows's fault. In that time period we also had:

1. budget devices from OEMs that cut corners at every cost

2. capacitor plague with merchants unable to guarantee good capacitors from any source

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#92

Post by jabroni_salad »

deelly wrote: post #38
dreamcompiler wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days. Not to mention being as easy to attack as a house made of butter.

And some people still use WinXP, Win 7, Win 8 etc...

At least you had a decent host firewall by then. Pre XP-SP2 you'd get malware just hooking up to the internet.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#93

Post by 13of40 »

jstanley wrote: post #31

What's crazy about this is that it sounds like the people writing the code haven't got the slightest hope of even compiling it, let alone running it. They're just writing code, crossing their fingers, and committing it. It's a wonder the thing ever worked at all.

In the early 2000s, there was no integration between the Windows build environment (Razzle) and Visual Studio. It was common for a dev to keep their own .sln file on their dev box so they could work on their component, while the actual build happened against a I-cannot-even-remember-what file that the Razzle environment used.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#95

Post by Kwpolska »

hunterjrj wrote: post #94

Plug for Dave Plummer's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage Dave was an engineer on NT and creator of Task Manager and zip folders. Lots of interesting stories and anecdotes from that period on that channel.

The built in zip folders that Dave wrote aren't something to be proud of these days, they are super slow and basic.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#96

Post by Kwpolska »

drewcoo wrote: post #24
inglor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Branching is an overstatement. SourceDepot didn't _really_ do branching. You had patches you'd float with "changelists" on top of enlistments. Each part large enough in thhe org (for example Excel or Word) gets a "branch" and it gets "forward integrated" and "reverse integrated" to the main "branch". From your perspective the tool used to submit stuff (usubmit usually) you just push to the same branch as everyone els…

SD was basically P4 with syntactic sugar. You likely didn't have permissions to create branches. Windows sources 20 years ago used to have a ridiculously complicated branching strategy, driven by middle managers and made worse by having actual devs sneak around the edges to do "buddy builds" of changes with some godawful batch file that I heard may have originated with RaymondC (who was exactly the kind of person to…

Did branching in SD work the Git way (where creating a branch is instantaneous and requires zero resources), or did it work the TFVC/old-style-VCS way, where a branch required creating a copy of all files and took many minutes (probably hours at NT scale)? If you are stuck with this kind of system (why would you be these days?), long lived team branches would be the only sustainable strategy.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#97

Post by oaiey »

exikyut wrote: post #49
inglor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am still in Microsoft, was part of that transition and can confirm it. We did move stuff we could to other git repos inside Microsoft. SourceDepot is still running for some stuff and is still awful but git is working great. > Also, they have about 10k people working on Windows (and devices) and about 10k people working on ads nowadays (that paints a good story of priorities). I'm not sure I'm privvy to all informatio…

If you have a moment, a tangential question. A little while ago I read a very interesting comment responding to some general "why is this and that broken [in Windows]", that said > Windows is only $5m a year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934946 I was very impressed to determine that was only $416k/mo. Since I read that I've been like "that can't be right." (There's certainly no qualification of scope to work…

I would take that with a serious grain of salt. The kernel is also in the Xbox, the headset, the azure deployments in some form, the server os, etc. There are easy three other divisions neck deep in the funding of the kernel.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#98

Post by oaiey »

andsoitis wrote: post #78
easton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but that book was excellent. Shows that people 30 years ago were having precisely the same problems on big software projects we have today.

> Shows that people 30 years ago were having precisely the same problems on big software projects we have today. An interesting question is: why are we still having the same problems today? why haven't they been solved yet?

Because our industry barely left their baby shoes behind it. We are not even teenagers.

And why our brilliance does not make a difference: it is a human problem :)

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#99

Post by qingcharles »

lozenge wrote: post #22
LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers? I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app sto…

> Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...

Apologies. This was me. Pretty much all 10. Most of them were just white-labels of the same code. Believe me, I hated doing it. MS didn't want to do the right thing and vertically-integrate everything like Apple was doing, which was the better solution as then you owned the entire user experience from end-to-end.

We know how that story ended.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#100

Post by exikyut »

inglor wrote: post #57
exikyut wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a moment, a tangential question. A little while ago I read a very interesting comment responding to some general "why is this and that broken [in Windows]", that said > Windows is only $5m a year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934946 I was very impressed to determine that was only $416k/mo. Since I read that I've been like "that can't be right." (There's certainly no qualification of scope to work…

I'm just a software engineer working for Microsoft and I'm on HN since I worked on 3 startups (one YC funded) and do a ton of open source (in my free time, Microsoft funds none of it). I enjoy working for Microsoft (mostly) but I have _no idea_ how our sales looks like.

Appreciate the reply.
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