Barbarians led by Bill Gates
From the epoch-making 1983 Las Vegas launch of Windows to the ongoing Internet Explorer v. Netscape antitrust suit, this "developer's eye view" sets the record straight on any number of hotly debated - and often hotly litigated - turning points in the short but colorful history of the Information Age. How did Microsoft miss the Internet boat in the first place, letting Netscape capture the lead in Web browsers? How exactly did they - or didn't they? - rip off the Macintosh in the development of the Windows interface? What's the real story - the truth that eluded even GO Corporation CEO Jerry Kaplan in his own book - of how Microsoft came from behind in pen computing to drive GO out of business? And how did Microsoft get all those "Windows" pillowcases all over Las Vegas in their first, half-million-dollar launch of the product that didn't exist?
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What Hacker News says
- “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” is required reading on the matter.
- "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" gives the history of the first 15 years or so of Windows.
"Fire in the Valley" a good history of the Silicon Valley through the original PC boom.
"Exploding the Phone" a history of phone phreaking.
"Shareware Heroes" a history of the shareware scene in the 80s and 90s.
- "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" has a good overview of the internal power struggle over their online stagey at this juncture. They largely resisted the wider internet because it was already developed and based around Unix tools and open standards. They saw no commercial value.
- Go read Jerry Kaplan's book "startup" about the issues or "The barbarians led by bill gates"
Price, supply, competition, software availability - all the classic problems that plagues all the "might have beens"; from the Atari Jaguar, the BeBox, Amiga, etc.
There's plenty of brilliant ideas that are in penpoint that have been abandoned.
The stars aligned for Apple but they could have easily aligned for GRiD or Visi On or Digital Research as well. Heck, the Japanese MSX system could have achieved in the mid 1980s what the USCD p-system also failed at and we technically didn't get until the Java phones of the early 2000s of true cross system compatibility.
So much of this is merely the whims and fancy of lady luck
- I was talking about things like Skylake's Memory Protection Extensions, Nehalems Safer Mode Extensions, Software Guard Extension, the virtualization extensions around 2005, page table virtualization with EPT, TXT, RDRAND for hardware entropy etc
That's why it depends
Things like AES and SHA are implemented in hardware these days.
We can get into discussion on whether netware or xenix on a 386 is an unusable dog or not, I've got an actual 386 about 6 feet away from me as I write this. I could even give you login if you want to live the pain.
Windows 95 made compromises, read barbarians led by Bill Gates for a good rundown. It was never intended to be their network line (NT), but instead for traditional home computers. Internet explorer was super last minute that's why it was just licensed code from spyglass mosaic. It was released the day after OEMs got windows 95.
Gates didn't think there'd be a large demand for dialup modem based internet and that they had a few years to worry about it. He pivoted effectively a month or two before release. That's why MS pushed multiple patches out quickly after the release to get a competent networking stack outside of winsock.
The people making windows 95 were competent and cared, they just had lots of conflicting priorities to attend to at once and people used it not as the manufacturers had intended. It's wasn't an easy job.
Sure it has security vulnerabilities by 2021 standards. I'd venture to say every system in 1995 that could reasonably run on a typical 4 year old home computer did at the time. 386BSD 1.0, NetBSD 1.1, Linux 1.3, likely all riddled with issues by modern standards.
And yes I'm obviously totally aware of the mainstream pop culture consensus of windows 95 sux or whatever. I mean duh, do you really think that's news to me?
I know it could BSOD with some malformed packets and that its user security was totally fake. It was totally used in ways it wasn't designed for.
Microsoft honestly thought serious stuff would be run on netware, MVS, sunos, os/2, hpux, nonstop os, tru64, os 2200, qnx, etc, certainly not windows 95. "Ah shit, here we go anyway"
The curse of success
- oh also, disrupted by dan lyons, although not as great, is good fun about the financialization and bullshit of modern tech life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_...
For a 90s take on that theme, try this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_Led_by_Bill_Gates
It's worth quoting how microsoft responded to some groundbreaking technology from Go computing by Microsoft putting together a fabricated circus claiming they had matched the technology:
next up on that stack for me to read are Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop and Robert Cringley's Accidental Empires.Eller's group kluged up this demo for videotape that showed how edit in place would work. He launched Excel with a chart in it. Then he launched Word with the chart cut from the Excel program. The smaller Excel window was hiding in the background, and the Word window was bigger so the audience couldn't see Excel. Eller drew a gesture on the chart sitting in Word, which called Excel to the top. As long as Excel was in the right place, it came right up on top of where Word was, and it didn't look like anything had moved. It looked like Word had just popped up the Excel menus right into the middle of the Word documents so it could be edited. Eller made the changes in Excel and closed it. He hooked up a software instruction that told Excel to move to the background and disappear behind Word. Then it looked like he was working again in Word with the proper Excel document embedded in it. It looked great on the tape, but it was total bull, pure smoke and mirrors, the apotheosis of vaporware. There was no linking or embedding occurring. Eller was simply pulling one application to the front of the other one. At the company meeting, executive Mike Maples stepped up to the podium. "Okay, here's this other thing we're working on," Maples said. "Here I have my document, and I have my tablet here." He held the pen up and waved it. "Now I can go into my Word document here, and I can write." While Maples was talking, charts and images flashed on the screen, and everybody thought he was actually writing on the pen tablet as he spoke at the podium. In actuality, he was just waving his pencil over blank paper while the videotape ran.
