The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
theregister.com
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
#2While he gave a nod to the Windows 95 design team for the iconic interface element, he explained how he'd worked out a way of avoiding a library of localized bitmaps by figuring out how to display sideways text.
In an email to The Register, Plummer told us: "Long story short, in the production builds, I've learned they went with bitmaps rather than the programmatic version.
"My guess is that's the way the art team had always delivered them ... and so it was just easier, but I don't have any real idea. I stay away from source code leaks so don't want to investigate the technicals!"
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#3Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time)
Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#4Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#5Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
In a photo editor and use bitmaps
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#6Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
Seems like a localization nightmare though. :)
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#7Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time) Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.
I'd think for a relatively modest use case like the menu title bar, you could rotate the necessary glyphs once and cache them.
then you have to deal with cache invalidation, you need to have triggers in all places that change the look of the menu, for example when you install a new program, change the OS language, etc.
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#8This 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
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#9This 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.
Re: The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
#10WinNT 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: press any key to wait or CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot" BSOD).
In WinNT, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do sh|t. All apps kept running. The Task Manager was loaded from disk (when the system found the time) and run in parallel with the other apps. On a busy system, especially if it was out of memory and doing disk thrashing, or some video/media was stuck with 100% CPU on high priority, there was no chance of recovering it with the Task Manager.