[HN Gopher] Windows 95 went the extra mile to ensure compatibili...
___________________________________________________________________
Windows 95 went the extra mile to ensure compatibility of SimCity,
other games
Author : fagnerbrack
Score : 211 points
Date : 2022-12-26 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| bradhe wrote:
| Is it that time of the month again that we republish this story?
| [deleted]
| squarefoot wrote:
| DOS compatibility however wasn't that great. I recall using OS/2
| (2.1 first, then Warp 3) DOS terminals to build and test Clipper
| programs. It was much a better experience, also for being able to
| emulate two networked DOS machines, which had some limitations
| and stability problems when using Windows 95 terminals.
| TillE wrote:
| I forget exactly how it worked, but you could just reboot into
| MS-DOS on your Windows 95 computer. Crucial for running games.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I just looked it up to refresh my memory. There was a
| "Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode" option in the shutdown
| menu.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Just reboot and press F8, or add BOOTGUI=1 to MSDOS.SYS
| rblatz wrote:
| How would that work? From my recollection the computer
| booted up in DOS ran through your config.sys and
| autoexec.bat. The final line typically in the autoexec.bat
| was win. Which would start up windows 95.
|
| Also when you shutdown windows 95 it would leave you at a
| DOS prompt. So no restart was actually needed.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Windows 95 didn't have "win" in the autoexec.bat, it
| autoloaded it. The behaviour was controlled in msdos.sys,
| which on 9x had various startup options including BootGUI
| (DOS was entirely in io.sys).
|
| IIRC "MS DOS mode" could either just exit Windows, or
| reboot the entire system depending on config (presumably
| if you wanted custom config.sys / autoexec.bat)? But I
| might be wrong, it's been years since I used 9x.
| vikingerik wrote:
| This is correct. msdos.sys was a text file with
| configuration values, which could be set to either auto-
| start Windows after running autoexec.bat, or not. In the
| former case, exiting Windows would stop at the "now safe
| to turn off your computer" screen. In the latter case,
| startup would go to a DOS command prompt, and Windows
| could be started from there, and exiting it would go back
| to DOS.
|
| Those two cases got conflated by the ability to start
| Windows from within autoexec.bat, which wasn't the
| Microsoft default but was a fairly common setup from some
| OEMs. To the OS, that's the case of starting Windows
| separately, but to the user, it looks like the auto-
| starting case.
| accrual wrote:
| Maybe it just gracefully ends the win.exe process,
| leaving you in DOS?
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| Don't know about gracefully (some drivers might not
| cleanly shut down), but Win95 did indeed exit to DOS. It
| left the screen in graphics mode with the message "It is
| now safe to turn off your computer", but you could
| blindly type some command to reset it to text mode.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think you are thinking of Win 3.x, not 9x; 95 was the
| first consumer Windows for which that description is
| wrong.
| Narishma wrote:
| What you describe was before Windows 95.
| dangero wrote:
| Yes! Right click on the exe file and change the startup
| options to do a full reboot into DOS. Definitely needed for
| the games that were hard coded to use the first MB of RAM
| squarefoot wrote:
| That is true, but my goal was to have two DOS terminals in
| which I could emulate two DOS networked machines sharing
| files, both running a client/server software I wrote, to
| emulate how they would work at a customer of mine shop. While
| it worked perfectly on OS/2, I encountered some stability
| problems on Windows 95, which also (if memory serves)
| required some more steps to allow DOS terminals to share
| their storage. By using OS/2 I could effectively replicate
| two machines in a single one and compile both client and
| server in a single take with 100% confidence that it would
| work once installed at the customer shop.
| skipkey wrote:
| During the beta of Windows 95 I was working at a company that
| had made a DOS extender for Clipper, and we got reports That
| the apps in 16 bit protected mode did not work. Looking in to
| it, there was a bug in the 16 bit FAT driver, I think, things
| are fuzzy from that long ago, which wasn't used by a lot of
| things. I actually managed to get a bug report in, talked to
| the guy working on the driver, and had a build Fedexed to me a
| couple of days later to verify the fix.
|
| Good times.
| hericium wrote:
| Recent discussion with 17 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33157215
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| Just an generalization. It seems like wine and steam/proton
| embodies the early Microsoft philosophy of (backward)
| compatibility as selling point, while the overall Linux mindset
| seems to be: "fuck you, you should have provided the source code
| if you wanted your software to work after the next dist-upgrade"
|
| Just to be clear. I wrote this on my linux mint laptop. I'm
| thankful for all the hard work people put into Debian, Ubuntu and
| Free Software in general. This is just an generalization.
| msla wrote:
| And these days, Windows is more about chasing the shiny than
| ensuring old applications run.
|
| I've had more luck with old Linux binaries running, myself.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I wouldn't say so, for windows you can run the same built
| package on anything from 7 to 10 without too many issues, on
| linux trying to install a package that hasn't been released
| on the current OS version package manager repo feels like
| blasting your brains out. At least for Debian/Ubuntu. And the
| only fallback is to compile the entire thing yourself,
| because fuck me right?
|
| Like sure I understand that having specific packages for each
| version should make it reliably work, but the trade off and
| demand for devs to keep up is pretty huge.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| This was one of the things I found very painless with
| gentoo surprisingly enough. I could easily slap together an
| ebuild on my local overlay that matched the dependencies of
| the deb/rpm even if that meant some old as dirt dep that
| wouldn't be on my machine normally. Then just `emerge sync
| -r localoverlay && emerge category/package-name` like
| normal. Maybe 5-10 minutes at most to do and I'd have a
| fully managed install that'd continue to work even if I
| tried to install it 5 years from now.
|
| I've tried similar on debian, ubuntu, and centos but
| fighting with apt or yum and their (seemingly)
| comparatively brittle packaging systems got very old very
| quickly. Not that it can't be done easily on those systems
| but so far I haven't managed it yet.
|
| Nix I find can also be really nice for this, especially
| since flake based packages are pretty much self contained.
| Still a lot less pleasant compared to the portage/ebuild
| route though.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| _Usually_ tracking down old versions of libraries works,
| except when it doesn 't of course. If the source is
| available, I think "just compile it" is kind of okay to be
| honest; it's usually not that hard, and if it is, then
| that's kind of a problem with that software's build system
| IMHO.
|
| I compiled xv from 1994 the other day on my Linux box; just
| has to make a tiny patch to fix an include (lots of
| warning, but it compiles and runs).
|
| That said, there's some room for improvement. For example
| pkg-config/pkgconf could automatically suggest which
| packages to install if "pkg-config --libs x11" fails, or
| some other distro-agnostic way for people to track down
| dependencies.
|
| If you're shipping a binary program without source (i.e. a
| game, for example, which tend to be closed source) you
| should ship the libraries or compile things statically.
| Some of the older Linux games on gog.com can be a bit
| tricky to run on modern systems due to this.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > tracking down old versions of libraries works
|
| See that's the thing, everything on linux is designed to
| work by sideloading as much as possible, depending on
| thirty thousand packages that must be all installed to
| the perfect version by apt or else nothing works. A good
| system if you need to get a fully featured OS running on
| 100 MB of disk space, which tbf is linux's niche, but
| it's absolute horseshit to maintain.
|
| Windows on the other hand tends to have flatpak-style
| monolithic executables, with the odd .NET framework or
| cpp resdistrubutable here and there, but it's the rare
| exception. Things tend to actually work when they bundle
| their dependencies. Hell, the average Java app ships the
| JRE along with it because nothing works if the wrong
| version is installed globally. Linux just takes that
| problem as a fact of life and tells you to fuck off.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| In general, I'm a fan of statically linked binaries or
| shipping the libraries with the application, so I mostly
| agree with you. But I also can't deny there's advantages
| to the shared-link approach as well. In short, there's
| upsides and downsides to both approaches and no perfect
| solution.
|
| In practice however, I rarely encounter issues, except
| for closed-source programs that _don 't_ ship their
| libraries. That, I think, is mostly the fault of the
| vendor and not the Linux system. Of course, as a user it
| doesn't really matter whose fault it is if your
| application doesn't work because you just want the damn
| thing to work. It does mean the problem (and solution) is
| mostly an educational one, rather than a technical one.
| You certainly _can_ ship binary programs that should work
| for decades to come: the two core components (Linux
| kernel and GNU libc) take backwards compatibility pretty
| serious, more or less on equal level with Windows.
|
| You don't even need flatpack. A wrapper script with
| "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./binary" gets you a long way (and
| still provides people the ability to use a system library
| if they want, so sort-of the best of both worlds).
| tadfisher wrote:
| That's everything on Unix-likes with shared libraries,
| yes. You can statically-link or use a system like Nix or
| Guix that don't enforce a single library version (by
| ditching the "default library search path" concept), and
| you get the best of both worlds: space saved for most of
| your shared library dependencies, and separate versions
| for those binaries that need them. It's basically Unix
| with a garbage collector.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I disagree. Couldn't get Deadly premonition working. Windows
| recommended XP compatibility mode and it worked!
|
| All the 25 years of code is still in Windows 11 they just
| hide it with a lick of paint. If you want to play old games
| Microsoft is still your best bet.
| msla wrote:
| > Couldn't get Deadly premonition working. Windows
| recommended XP compatibility mode and it worked!
|
| This just tells me Windows is on a level with Linux + Wine,
| with the compatibility mode.
|
| > All the 25 years of code is still in Windows 11 they just
| hide it with a lick of paint.
|
| That's not true. Windows had a big, discontinuous shift
| when they abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the
| move to XP.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Which is why you need a Dos Box to play DOS games.
| tadfisher wrote:
| That wasn't true for Windows XP, which shipped with the
| NT Virtual DOS Machine (ntvdm.dll). Unfortunately, this
| was dropped in 64-bit Windows and finally axed in Windows
| 10.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| You're welcome to try getting Deadly premonition working
| in Linux!
| mrintegrity wrote:
| I was about to gloat, as it's so cheap to buy, I thought
| it was a good opportunity to test Steam proton by
| selecting "enforce compatibility" which so far has worked
| for everything I threw at it (CIV V, hitman absolution,
| bunch of other obscure windows only titles).
|
| Initially happy as the install and intro ran fine, but
| pressing enter to skip the video exits the game
| immediately.
|
| Maybe that's further than you would expect, wine / proton
| is incredibly good nowadays, but still your point stands.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Windows had a big, discontinuous shift when they
| abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the move to
| XP.
|
| You mean the move to the NT platform, which made the
| consumer windows desktop OS finally stable.
|
| Compatibility features, while not perfect, were
| implemented to help try and get Win9x and DOS workloads
| to function normally. Some DOS apps ran fine on XP in
| compatibility mode, although I couldn't say what %.
| jorvi wrote:
| As the joke goes, Win32 is the Linux ABI.
|
| There are a lot of baffling decisions by Microsoft's
| Windows division, but their extreme dedication towards
| backward compatibility is nothing short of Herculean.
|
| Sometimes I wish they'd split up Windows in an ultra-slow
| 'Enterprise' ring and a move-fast (think about the speed of
| macOS changes) 'consumer' ring, where they could drop much
| of the legacy cruft in trade for speedy/forced
| improvements. Think macOS going fully 64 bit, making the
| system image immutable, etc.
|
| Hell, imagine if they'd allowed the Xbox One, X and S to
| run Windows 11 in S mode. Instant cheap performant computer
| for the layperson! And with it running S mode, they'd make
| their money through the Microsoft Store.
| nektro wrote:
| this is very much distro specific experiences. others and Linux
| upstream care very much
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mike_hock wrote:
| _Linux_ takes backward compatibility very seriously. The FOSS
| ecosystem as a whole has the whole spectrum, so the bad apples
| break it for everyone.
|
| The result isn't even "fuck you, recompile." The result is,
| "fuck you, you better be constantly fixing the shit that we
| broke with our breaking changes."
|
| This is part of the value that distros bring to the table.
| Providing a snapshot of versions that actually interoperate
| well.
| lmm wrote:
| > Linux takes backward compatibility very seriously. The FOSS
| ecosystem as a whole has the whole spectrum, so the bad
| apples break it for everyone.
|
| > The result isn't even "fuck you, recompile." The result is,
| "fuck you, you better be constantly fixing the shit that we
| broke with our breaking changes."
|
| Linux's approach to _drivers_ is the most "fuck you, you
| better be constantly fixing the shit that we broke with our
| breaking changes" of any OS. It does take userland
| compatibility seriously though.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I thought that at least the kernel philosophy was the exact
| opposite? The "never break userland" motto?
| 5436436347 wrote:
| That philosophy extends to the kernel only - there are
| multiple other dependencies for running programs that may not
| have a stable API/ABI, or the same compatibility approach.
| Shared libraries like glibc may be updated, graphical
| interfaces may differ, search paths may not be uniform, etc.
| and these can all break a program.
| Throw4949 wrote:
| If you want stable binary compatibility, use distro that
| focuses on that (Suse, Redhat). Not some joke build around
| opensource idea and communism!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > the overall Linux mindset seems to be: "fuck you, you should
| have provided the source code if you wanted your software to
| work after the next dist-upgrade"
|
| These days you just need a container. Or use Nix/Guix, which
| makes it easy to preserve required dependencies for an older
| app even when upgrading other parts of the system.
| krater23 wrote:
| And a lot of space on the harddrive to house the last 20
| versions of your operating system...
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| That mindset only really applies to the weird enthusiast OS's
| like arch & gentoo, where the need to recompile half your stuff
| after an upgrade is almost the point. Everything else from my
| experience has been pretty good at maintaining compatibility
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| What about that classic meme of Linus (Tech Tips, not
| Torvalds) running the equivalent of `apt update` on Pop OS
| and breaking the entire Desktop Environment?
|
| I'd be lying if I said I'd never done something similar when
| trying to switch from the open-source Nvidia drivers (glitchy
| at 4k60, at the time) to the officially provided ones.
| j5155 wrote:
| To be clear, Linus got an error trying to install an app
| via the GUI, ran the equivalent terminal command, and
| directly overrode the warning telling him what would happen
| before his desktop environment broke. It wasn't quite as
| simple as just apt upgrade.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| The point is that it gave him a text warning that
| basically said "press y to destroy your whole Desktop
| Environment" buried in a wall of text that you'd normally
| ignore. This is beyond terrible UX and would never happen
| outside of Linux/FOSS.
| csande17 wrote:
| In a proprietary operating system, you just wouldn't have
| been allowed to uninstall the desktop environment at all.
| Unfortunately, you are also forbidden from uninstalling
| Facebook if they have a deal with your device's
| manufacturer.
| eastAligned wrote:
| There is a huge space between cli everything and pre-
| infested walled garden. I have always felt that there
| should be more visual differences in the standard newby
| frendly tools for linix. Many problems would be avoided
| with a basic graphic interface.
| lmm wrote:
| In my experience that's backwards; Arch and Gentoo are far
| better at telling you exactly what you need to stay backwards
| compatible and letting you do it than the fancy commercial
| distros are. (E.g. compare the difficulty of running the
| original Linux release of Quake 3 on those distros).
| lastdong wrote:
| I recall buying a magazine that focused on the Win95 launch. The
| highlight was the ability to play Prince of Persia in the
| included DOS. Backwards compatibility was effectively a major
| selling point.
| moomin wrote:
| Maybe for once someone should tell the story of how Windows 3.1
| went the extra mile to ensure incompatibility to the extent of
| getting an antitrust settlement enforced.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
|
| ^ For those unfamiliar with what this poster is talking about.
|
| tl;dr:
|
| In a _beta_ release of windows 3.1 Microsoft included code to
| detect if the user was running authenticate DOS or a third-
| party clone and errored out if it wasn't the real thing. The
| code was disabled on for the actual release of 3.1 that went
| out to customers.
|
| Internal memos about the code came to light during the
| government's antitrust prosecution of Microsoft. When this
| happened the new owner of the clone DOS system sued Microsoft
| and they settled to make the case go away and get the anti-
| trust headlines out of the news.
| acdha wrote:
| Clone isn't quite the right term since Digital Research made
| the original CPM which Seattle Computing used as the basis
| for their 86-DOS which they sold to Microsoft:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS
| Randor wrote:
| I don't know why SimCity and just a few titles are getting media
| attention on this. There perhaps a dozen more games and quite a
| few applications that were being patched at runtime.
|
| At Microsoft this eventually became a feature: Application
| Compatibility Database
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/devnotes/app...
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Likely because SimCity was a memorable game that can be
| associated strongly with that era in our nostalgia. But also,
| not something "serious" such as tools designed for work or
| productivity.
|
| Having MS design Win95 with specific hacks for SimCity means
| that MS thought that SimCity was special and important, which
| reminds people in that era that they also thought SimCity was
| special and important -- and it's mildly or moderately
| interesting enough for these people to find "behind the scenes"
| work which validates their nostalgic memories.
| asveikau wrote:
| SimCity was also quite huge and novel in the 90s. I think
| it's easy to underestimate that now.
| flomo wrote:
| SimCity games had long shelf-lives and were on the sales
| charts for years. It could be it wasn't individually special
| and it was just "make sure the top 20 windows games work".
| skylanh wrote:
| I see you aren't familiar with Raymond Chen.
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthi
| n...
|
| Microsoft had a program internally within it's development
| teams for Windows 95 that you could get _any_ software for
| free. You just had to agree that you 'd ensure it was
| compatible with Windows 95 and take ownership of its quirks
| to get it to run on Windows 95.
| mike_hock wrote:
| "Just."
| [deleted]
| supertrope wrote:
| Website compatibility issues get blamed on the browser. GPU
| drivers include game specific workarounds.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Everything worked fine back on Windows 3.1. Then you upgraded
| to Windows 95 and now your favourite game crashes. Why would
| you not blame Microsoft for this?
| afterburner wrote:
| You would. Not OP but I believe they're highlighting an
| analogous situation in our present time.
| yunohn wrote:
| GPUs and games have a vested commercial interest in ensuring
| they work.
|
| On the other hand, both the website and browser are mostly
| provided for free. Paid websites often do put the extra effort
| in to make it work everywhere, eg IE/Safari compat.
| astrange wrote:
| Someone's paying for you to use the browser, even if it's not
| you - it's not like Mozilla is hoping everyone will stop
| using Firefox. So browsers do have compatibility checks for
| websites sometimes.
| Slaminerag wrote:
| There are an awful lot of expensive apps with web front ends
| that only worked with IE6 for years.
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| I own the games Myst 1993 for Windows 95 and I own the point and
| click adventure Ankh 2005 on Linux ported by RuneSoft. Only one
| of the 2 games I am able to run on modern hardware on a modern
| Linux without going the extra mile of compiling stuff.
|
| It's a shame but older Windows software runs better under wine
| then old Linux software does under Linux. Maybe we need a line?!
| [deleted]
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Absolutely off-topic, but I need to get it out of myself:
|
| I just noticed Joel Spolsky's surname means "from Poland" ("z
| Polski")
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last names
| when speaking to hurried immigrant families. My last name is
| pretty close to "Von Der Hook" by pronunciation, which is awful
| close to "from the hook" (Hoek, a part of Netherlands). My
| friend is quite close to "From the Sluis", which is another
| part of Netherlands.
|
| Add to that the various spellings "Vander X, Van Der X,
| VanderX". I'm sure the conversation went
|
| "Surname?"
|
| "Vas?"
|
| "Where you from?"
|
| "Von Der Hook"
|
| _scribbles something on intake card_. "Next!"
| bitwize wrote:
| My sister's ex-husband's family tacked a "-ski" onto their
| surname while immigrating to avoid sounding too German. They
| immigrated during one of the World Wars (I believe it was the
| second) when anti-German sentiment was high.
| [deleted]
| asveikau wrote:
| Not doubting your story, but wanted to add that many European
| Jewish communities especially wound up with surnames that
| reference geography. That would have happened centuries
| before the US existed, representing migrations that happened
| in Europe.
|
| Don't have a lot of details on this history (which i heard
| orally) but a Google search for "Jewish surnames geography"
| seems to back me up.
| Animats wrote:
| China still struggles with that. A traditional question is
| "what is your village?", to get name uniqueness in a system
| which has too few family names.
|
| France at one time went to the other extreme - names had to
| be approved by a central registry at birth. Until 1993,
| there was an official list of allowed first names. Today,
| there are still some prohibited names. "Nutella" just made
| the list.
| tomcam wrote:
| > "Nutella" just made the list
|
| My wife is French. We're expecting our third child and
| the other two, Banana and Oatmeal, were devastated.
| shagie wrote:
| In #dadjokes on one of the slack channels I'm in...
|
| > On the way home I'd pick up Pizza and Coke. She wasn't
| happy with me.
|
| > Fur fgvyy unfa'g sbetvira zr sbe anzvat gur xvqf.
|
| https://rot13.com
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Yeah this very much might be how surnames actually
| happened. I wouldn't know. Or, a little of column A and
| column B.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I'm surprised there aren't more people around with the
| surname Vas
| bazoom42 wrote:
| > I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last
| names when speaking to hurried immigrant families
|
| This is a myth.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I have an incomprehensible last name and it often gets
| butchered by busy people.
|
| It would not surprise me at all if some overworked
| government employee doesn't really care what noises the
| foreigner is trying to make. This was in a time when lots
| of people couldn't read or write.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| C'mon, you can't just drop that in with no corroborating
| data.
|
| I could, with similar authority, state that it being a myth
| is a myth.
| roywiggins wrote:
| "Someone wanting to book passage to America, Canada,
| Australia, South America, etc., would have had no
| difficulty locating an agent. Agents quoted ticket prices
| to the would-be traveler, accepted payment, and then
| recorded each traveler's name and other identifying
| information (the specific information collected varied
| over the years). The information taken down by the agents
| was sent to the home office, where it was transferred by
| shipping company clerks onto large blank sheets provided
| by the US government. Those sheets became the passenger
| lists which later were used by American port officials."
|
| https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655
| /89...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| No doubt this kind of thing happened, but people also just
| changed their names over time because it's easier. One of my
| grandfather's brother migrated to Canada in the 50s, and he
| now goes by "Vanderloo" or "Vanderlo" (not entirely sure how
| he spells it) instead of "Van der Loo".
|
| Same people Dutch people named Martijn or Maarten, who will
| often use Martin abroad. Johan Cruijff is typically known as
| Cruyff abroad, etc.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't know anything about refugees immigrating into the US
| so I can't refute your story in any way, but one thing worthy
| of note is that Dutch names often include geographical areas
| with "van de/van der/van" (meaning "of, from") as an
| insertion ("tussenvoegsel") between first and last name .
| "van der Sluis" would be a perfectly normal Dutch name. I
| also wouldn't think twice about "van der Hoek" if I heard
| someone introduce themselves by that name.
|
| Many people had to pick surnames when the French occupied the
| Netherlands, often leading to geographical names, references
| to occupations, or sometimes even jokes ("Naaktgeboren" being
| relatively common, meaning "born naked"). The forefathers of
| someone named "van der Sluis" could have lived near a
| sluice/lock, lived near a place called Sluis, or perhaps
| operated sluices/locks as part of their job in the barging
| industry.
|
| English speaking countries where last names consisting of
| multiple words were incredibly rare often concatenate(d) such
| names into one or fewer words. To many English speakers the
| only name with multiple words would imply nobility (if they
| even considered the concept at all) and I wouldn't expect
| nobility to arrive amidst refugees either. To this day some
| American websites refuse to take the space in my last name.
|
| As an added bonus, Dutch names specifically can have
| "tussenvoegsels" that are part of the name but need to be
| treated specially to be used correctly (i.e. when sorting a
| list of names). Depending on if the name belongs to a Belgian
| or a Dutchman the capitalisation rules also differ (the
| Flemish capitalising the "Van", the Dutch using lowercase
| letters). Of course other languages and cultures also have
| their own naming schemes with grammar rules (take
| German/Austrian "von" or Danish "af/de/von" for example);
| it's hardly a unique concept, but the details differ between
| countries.
|
| It's no wonder those poor American immigration workers
| couldn't make heads or tails out of the names these people
| brought into their country. As a Dutchman, the end result is
| often quite interesting to witness when Americans or
| Canadians with Dutch names appear on TV, most names
| containing their own special deviation from "normal" Dutch
| names.
| asveikau wrote:
| I wonder if Yiddish speaking ancestors pronounced that S as SH
| because P follows it, which would not be in keeping with its
| Slavic root.
| asveikau wrote:
| Now that Mr. Spolsky himself cleared up the etymology, I wish
| i could delete this.
|
| But he cited something with the letter sh, indicating the sh
| sound. So I think I was onto something.
| rr808 wrote:
| https://forward.com/culture/13721/how-did-jews-choose-their-...
| describes reasons how and why Jewish people chose names in
| Europe when Joseph II enforced them.
| https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/importa...
| spolsky wrote:
| A common assumption, but it is actually from Shpola, a city in
| the Ukraine.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Really? I assumed it's the same genesis as the word "spruce"
| ("z Prus")
| switch007 wrote:
| In case you missed it, that is Spolsky himself replying to
| you
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Indeed I did miss that, but fortunately my reply wouldn't
| have changed.
|
| Now I kinda hope for further details. Is the surname from
| adjective "Shpolians'kii"?
| fsckboy wrote:
| seems reasonable to hypothesize that the Ukranian town might
| have named "from Poland"
| bernardv wrote:
| Very cool. I was an MS Windows Tech Support during the Win31/1 to
| Win95 transition. Looking back, it went pretty smoothly. Most of
| our calls were HW driver related or usability related if I
| remember well.
| mysterydip wrote:
| That must have been a wild time, between brand new interfaces
| and a changing hardware landscape. Did you have many BSOD
| calls, or was that what you meant with HW driver related?
| nikanj wrote:
| About as wild as any given day in Node.js land
| bernardv wrote:
| Plenty of BSOD calls for sure. Also some very memorable calls
| from a bunch of Linux guys who would think-up of a monster
| Windows machine loaded with all sorts of crazy hardware
| peripherals and call support to mess with us.
| derefr wrote:
| Are you sure it was truly just to mess with you? If I were
| a Linux kernel maintainer back then, and there was some
| hardware I wanted to fix support for but didn't personally
| have the money to buy, I think "trick Microsoft into
| divulging how their own driver for it works" would be what
| I'd see as a "clever hack"!
| bernardv wrote:
| Perhaps. But I think some of them were actually more
| senior techs calling in and messing with the new guy.
| flandish wrote:
| Same here, though not for MS, just ISPs and resellers. Most
| often, iirc, it was drivers on floppies and "how do I do ..."
| bcrescimanno wrote:
| I'll share my own story of the Windows 3.1 -> 95 migration and
| MS Tech support. At the time, I was using my grandfather's old
| PC that had originally been a 486sx 33mhz processor with 4mb of
| RAM and a 200mb HDD. We upgraded the machine using an Intel
| "Overdrive" processor to a 486dx/2 66mhz processor with 8mb of
| RAM and added a Soundblaster 16 sound card and triple-speed CD
| ROM drive. I received a copy of Windows 95 for Christmas 1995
| and proceeded to install it on the system. It worked pretty
| well and, a few months later, I decided I wanted to add the "MS
| Plus!" pack.
|
| I was 14 years old and knew very little about PCs at the time;
| though, I was learning. What I definitely didn't know at the
| time was that the HDD in the machine that I was told was nearly
| 500MB was actually a 200mb drive that had been compressed with
| an older version of DriveSpace. The addition of Plus! upgraded
| the compression to DriveSpace 3 which corrupted something on
| the drive that caused the system to hardlock as soon as the
| Windows 95 UI appeared no matter what I did.
|
| After spending 4-5 hours on the phone with a very patient tech
| support specialist at MS, he eventually concluded that I would
| need to format the drive as nothing we did in those hours
| worked at all. Definitely a major learning experience for me
| doing my first full system format and OS reinstall.
|
| By the end of 1996, I'd be doing my first Linux installation on
| a slightly newer PC that I saved money from a summer job to
| buy. If it hadn't been for DriveSpace 3 and an MS tech support
| specialist who educated the hell out of me for a few hours, who
| knows when (or even if) I would have gone down the rabbit hole
| that led to my career.
| cydonian_monk wrote:
| It's difficult to explain to people today just how good
| Microsoft tech support was in the early-mid 1990s. We had a
| similarly complex issue with DOS 6.something that I don't
| remember the full details of, and I think I learned more
| about operating systems in the couple hours we were on the
| phone with MS than I did in the semester-long operating
| systems class I took in college. Some days after the call we
| got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a
| small bug fix that helped with whatever the situation was we
| had encountered. Just night and day compared to most modern
| interactions with tech companies.
| bernardv wrote:
| The most rewarding calls were those helping either very young
| or very old customers who just needed help getting started. I
| recall a grandfather calling in with his grandson, trying to
| figure out the new Windows machine he had just bought him.
| Being patient and understanding was all it took to make a
| difference.
| krimpenrik wrote:
| That is pretty wild, imagine that support in the current
| climate
| leonidasv wrote:
| This lead me to wonder if retail Windows licenses are
| expensive because they used to include a phone support and
| then, when people learned how to Google for problems,
| Microsoft dropped the phone support but kept the price
| because "customers are used to this price tag"?
|
| I recently bought a Windows 11 machine that came with
| Windows 11 Home, I felt the need for some Pro features and
| went to check the price for an upgrade and my jaw dropped.
| Years of "free upgrade to Windows 10/11" lead me believe
| those licences were less pricey nowadays.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| $199.99 if I'm not mistaken.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| At the same time, it's probably worth remembering the
| contemporary Microsoft rule of thumb that "each product-
| support call costs a sale"[1], that is to say, handling a
| single product-support call to that standard costs as much
| as was earned by selling the product in the first place
| (and the products weren't exactly cheap--not that they've
| become cheap now).
|
| [1] "Old New Thing" (the print one), https://books.google.c
| om/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC&lpg=PA1&pg=PT...
| dzdt wrote:
| Exactly. We are moving to a tine where having a person
| individually and attentively help you with anything is a
| high order luxury item.
|
| A major change is on the horizon though. We are close to
| where a large language model could play the role of the
| support side of that call. But if it an AI on the support
| side, would anyone bother to learn on the customer side?
| overgard wrote:
| As amazing as this was, I do think subscription software and
| near-universal internet access has changed the equation now.
| Apple breaks backwards compatibility and old software all the
| time, and there's essentially no consequence.
| nraynaud wrote:
| I am always torn about the agressivity of MS on the marketplace
| at the time and their displayed technical insecurity visible in
| trying to ensure compatibility with existing apps (vs telling
| external developers to fix things).
| bmalicoat wrote:
| When I worked at Xbox I was amazed to see the 360 game boot code
| had multiple title ID checks in it. For some titles it would
| report things differently, for others it would sleep a bit. When
| new features like cloud saves were introduced, those code paths
| for checking storage devices had per title ID branches too. It
| seems like whether you design your APIs perfectly or poorly,
| someone will use them in a way just outside of your intention.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Interesting how SimCity relied on use-after-free working and that
| was the issue.
|
| Obviously the correct solution was to rewrite SimCity for Windows
| 3.x in Rust, thus avoiding this very common bug. /s
| jerrysievert wrote:
| I've been updating some MUDs to work on "modern" OS's, and have
| run into so many use-after-free issues that it's almost become
| a hobby fixing them.
| 1f60c wrote:
| MUD?
| nemacol wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
| myko wrote:
| I now maintain the MUD I played as a child and have been
| playing whack a mole with bugs like this for years. I'm a
| very poor C coder so still run into issues pretty often!
| Interestingly the game is much more stable on my MBP that I
| use for development than it is on the production Ubuntu 18
| server I run it on. Not too bad for a Diku.
|
| Do you hang out in the Mud Coder's Guild Slack at all? You
| might find it interesting: https://mudcoders.com/join-the-
| mud-coders-guild-6770301ddcbd...
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Backwards-compatibility between new Windows OS releases and
| previously available apps has always been great. Recently, things
| have regressed a _little bit_ , but even on Windows 11, you can
| still run anything available for Windows 8 (released over a
| decade ago) just fine by simply ticking a checkbox.
|
| And for apps where the out-of-the-box mitigations don't work, the
| inscrutably-named _Assessment and Deployment Kit_
| (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-start...)
| will most likely help you out. Sure, some truly ancient apps
| (mostly DOS and OG-WinAPI) really won't work anymore, but those
| are better relegated to a VM anyway, if only for security
| reasons.
|
| If you want to understand why Windows still occupies a _lot_ of
| IT mindset even in Y2K22, understanding the traditional Microsoft
| approach to backwards compatibility (as much demonstrated
| deficiencies as it has...) is a necessary first step.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You can even run stuff from Windows 98-2000 if you're lucky.
| Joeri wrote:
| Ecco Pro was last built in 1997 and still has an active user
| community on windows 10.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I installed a webcam driver for Windows Vista on Windows 10 the
| other day. As you said, all I had to do was check a box in the
| compatibility options.
| LaLaLand122 wrote:
| There was still a need for webcam drivers when Vista was
| released?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There are videos on YouTube upgrading from Windows 1.0 all the
| way to the most recent versions.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure such exercises work fine for any real-life OS:
| if you take, say, Ubuntu 1.0, then run all the intermediate
| upgrade steps, you'll eventually end up with an up-to-date
| system as well.
|
| The real question, though, is: after a successful OS upgrade,
| how many of your installed apps still work without issues?
|
| On Linux, this varies: popular source-available apps tend to
| do fine, whereas less-common and proprietary (not to mention
| expensive!) apps fail after even minor updates, with no other
| resolution than 'ask your app supplier to do better', which
| is not always an option due to said supplier being too
| burned-out, bankrupt, or both.
|
| On MacOS, apps generally seem to have a 2-5 year lifetime,
| after which they break for various (often minor) reasons.
| Resolution is as per above, and often unavailable due to
| suppliers disappearing or giving up because of to the
| relatively small size of the MacOS market. iOS has similar
| issues.
|
| On Windows, you can generally continue to use even the most
| obsolete apps for 10-20 years, and often even longer. Of
| course, traumatic generational changes (obsoleting DOS or
| 16-bit WinAPI apps) still take their toll, but compared to
| other operating systems, this happens a lot less often, and
| migration tooling is often available.
| [deleted]
| Arrath wrote:
| > Windows 8 (released over a decade ago)
|
| Surely you lie.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8, "Windows 8 is a
| major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by
| Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1,
| 2012"
|
| Per https://www.google.com/search?q=decade+in+years, a decade
| is 10 years, making the above date since December 26, 2022,
| over a decade ago?
|
| But possibly, per Bill Clinton, that all depends on "what the
| meaning of the word 'is' is"? Or I'm missing some implied
| sarcasm? Usually Occam's Razor would help out, but I just got
| downvoted _twice_ for enumerating some historical facts on a
| separate thread, so who knows...
| Arrath wrote:
| Naw simply a joke.
|
| My mental model of Windows 8 is "that toc (terrible half of
| the cycle) windows release to 7's tic, that I had to remove
| from my Aunt's new laptop and found that UEFI made
| downgrading to Win7 a right ballache and I swear I did this
| 3 years ago not 10" How time flies.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Some software I code works on Windows XP through 11 without
| issue. Some of the tools I work on still work on Windows 2000
| though I don't still test for it.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| At last, a story of something Microsoft did in the 1990s that we
| can all support!
|
| (I mean, unless you prize productivity.... goddamn did SimCity
| eat whole DAYS for me back then.)
| [deleted]
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