liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with microsoft

A lot of history in computing is being lost. Stuff that was mainstream, common knowledge early in my career is largely forgotten now.

This includes simple knowledge about how to operate computers… which is I think why Linux desktops (e.g. GNOME and Pantheon) just throw stuff out: because their developers don’t know how this stuff works, or why it is that way, so they think it’s unimportant.

Some of these big companies have stuff they’ve forgotten about. They don’t know it’s historically important. They don’t know that it’s not related to any modern product. The version numbering of Windows was intentionally obscure.

Example: NT. First release of NT was, logically, 1.0. But it wasn’t called that. It was called 3.1. Why?

Casual apparent reason: well because mainstream Windows was version 3.1 so it was in parallel.

This is marketing. It’s not actually true.

Real reason: MS had a deal in place with Novell to include some handling of Novell Netware client drive mappings. Novell gave MS a little bit of Novell’s client source code, so that Novell shares looked like other network shares, meaning peer-to-peer file shares in Windows for Workgroups.

(Sound weird? It wasn’t. Parallel example: 16-bit Windows (i.e. 3.x) did not include TCP/IP or any form of dial-up networking stack. Just a terminal emulator for BBS use, no networking over modems. People used a 3rd party tool for this.

But Internet Explorer was supported on Windows 3.1x. So MS had to write its own alll-new dialup PPP stack and bundle it with 16-bit IE. Otherwise you could download the MS browser for the MS OS and it couldn’t connect and that would look very foolish.

The dialup stack only did dialup and could not work over a LAN connection. The LAN connection could not do PPP or SLIP over a serial connection. Totally separate stacks.

Well, the dominant server OS was Netware and again the stack was totally separate, with different drivers, different protocols, everything. So Windows couldn’t make or break Novell drive mappings, and the Novell tools couldn’t make or break MS network connections.

Thus the need for some sharing of intellectual property and code.)

Novell was, very reasonably, super wary of Microsoft. MS has a history of stealing code: DoubleSpace contained stolen STAC code; Video for Windows contained stolen Apple QuickTime code; etc. etc.

The agreement with Novell only covered “Windows 3.1”. That is why the second, finished, working edition of Windows for Workgroups, a big version with massive changes, was called… Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

And that’s why NT was also called 3.1. Because that way it fell under the Novell agreement.

Postscript

A decade ago I wrote about the decline and fall of Netware:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/

But I didn't mention another pecularity of the Novell/MS uneasy relationship around the time of the launch of NT.

Novell did not really believe that a new MS OS had a chance. So, although MS kept asking, and provided Novell with betas, Novell did not write a Netware client for NT.

So MS wrote its own. It reverse-engineered the protocol and embedded its own Netware client into NT. It was initially able to connect to Netware 3 servers, but later gained basic authentication-only support for Netware 4's NDS as well.

Novell backpedalled and hastily wrote a client. If I recall correctly – it's more than 30 years ago now – it shipped after NT 3.1 came out. So it was initally buggy and that meant it could crash the new crash-proof OS.

Meaning that they competed: admins, including me, had a choice. Run the functionally-limited but stable MS client, or the feature-rich Novell client that could destabilise your very expensive high-end workstations?

Worse was to come. Since they'd already reverse-engineered the client, MS implemented a server as well. NT could pretend to be a Netware server, and unmodified Netware client PCs (DOS, Windows 3, Windows for Workgroups, whatever) could connect to an NT box without changing the client. And as that was elaborate and involved a lot of memory optimisation, that helped.

The server emulation wasn't a deal-breaker, but it weakened the Novell position. But failing to write a client for what rapidly became a serious business workstation OS was a critical error and at that extremely risky time for Novell, it contributed to the company's fall.

(Hacked together from a few Reddit comments. Pardon disjointedness.)

Corel LinuxOS was a great distro. I reviewed it at the time.

It was the first serious big-backer effort to make Debian user-friendly and to make a Linux distro that could rival Windows NT 4 as a credible business desktop OS.

It has a custom remix of KDE -- I think KDE 2 -- heavily rewritten to make it more like WinXP. So they looked at Konqueror and discarded it as a bad job (overcomplex, trying to do too many different things... as KDE itself eventually decided too).

It had its own file manager, very like Windows Explorer. A real pleasure to work with. It even browsed Windows networks, better than anything can today.

IMHO, having used KDE since version 1, it was the best version of KDE ever and the only one I liked using. (2nd place: Red Hat Linux' Bluecurve edition in RH 9, before the Fedora/RHEL split, but that was just a really good theme and replacement of all the KDE apps with best-of-breed alternatives, which usually meant Gtk apps.)

I think Corel defaulted to Netscape Communicator as its web browser & email client -- Firefox didn't exist yet.

It was the first Linux ever to have display setup and adjustment using a graphical tool. You could just pick a colour depth from a drop-down, and drag a slider to adjust screen res. Just like Windows. This was world-beating stuff in the late 1990s -- nobody had ever seen anything like it on any Unix before. (Except maybe NeXTstep on its proprietary hardware. Which didn't do colour at all in the first versions.)

And of course it had WordPerfect, too. Remember this is before StarOffice (later OpenOffice later LibreOffice) was acquired by Sun and made freeware and later FOSS.

WordPerfect started out on Data General minicomputers in the 1970s. It was ported to everything early on. There were versions for the Atari ST, Amiga, OS/2 and classic MacOS as well as for MS-DOS.

The original edition was text-based and famed not only for its speed and very useful "reveal codes" function, which split the window into 2 showing editable markup in the bottom half, but also its very rich printer support.

In the era of text-based OSes, pre-GUI, it was common for apps to have to provide their own printer drivers. The OS maybe managed spooling but nothing more. No drivers. If you wanted bold or underline, you had to write all your own drivers.

WordPerfect did this better than anyone. It supported just about every printer in the world and did it better than anyone.

This early text-mode WordPerfect also ran on text-based Unix. I had a customer who wanted it on SCO Xenix 386. I installed it. It worked and the printer support was great, but fought for control with SCO's spooler. I had to edit SCO's "printer drivers" (really just shell scripts with minimal start/stop/set paper size control) in order to get it working.

The result was not great. In the end the customer switched users who needed wordprocessing from terminals to PCs running local copies of WP, and a terminal emulator for talking to the SCO host.

(SCO did not include networking -- it was an expensive optional extra on an expensive OS. X.11 was another extra. A C compiler was another.)

So WP always ran on Unix, for about 40 years, from before Linux was invented.

The first full-GUI WYSIWYG version, I think, was on OS/2 2. That was later ported to Windows 3 (and wasn't very good at first).

That's the version that they ported to Linux, version 8 of a full native rich Unix app, but an old Unix app with an old design, probably originating on SCO and running on various 1980s proprietary non-x86 Unixes, such as AIX, Solaris, etc.

I used it and liked it but it was a bit clunky. Printer support was good, though, which was a weak point on Linux back then.

So when Corel did a Linux distro, a selling point was the inclusion of WP 8.

There were 3 separate versions of WordPerfect on Unix.

#1 -- the original text-based version, no GUI, for proprietary Unixes with no GUI, such as SCO Xenix.

#2 -- the later graphical version, derived in part from the OS/2 and Windows 3 codebase, which was bundled in Corel LinuxOS. This was WordPerfect for Linux version 8, and it was a full native Linux app.

#3 WordPerfect Office

So about #3...

Corel got really into Linux around the end of the 1990s. It ported graphical WYSIWYG WordPerfect, it did its own distro, and it did its own ARM-based hardware, the Netwinder.

But there was no Linux office suite yet. WP 8 was the first credible commercial wordprocessor for the OS yet.

So Corel, flushed with confidence, and having now acquired WordPerfect Corp and part of Borland (for the Paradox database and Quattro Pro spreadsheet) and having its own Windows office suite, decided to port the whole thing to Linux.

But only WordPerfect was portable, cross-platform code. The other apps (Paradox, Quattro, Impress (presentations), InfoCentral (PIM) etc.) were Windows-only.

So it used WINE, specifically winelib. This was a related project to WINE but instead of letting you run Windows binaries, winelib lets you port Windows apps to Linux by providing Windows-compatible APIs to link to.

The result is a native Linux binary, although often called WHATEVER.EXE, which installs and runs natively -- but displays everything by calling winelib functions which translate Windows API calls to Linux ones.

That's how WordPerfect Office for Linux was written. Custom, tailored versions of the apps, with stuff that was totally Windows-specific removed, and features adjusted to work with winelib. But still, not a true native Linux app -- a suite of big complex Windows apps ported to Linux via WINE, and so dependent on WINE. And this is 20y ago and WINE wasn't very mature yet.

It worked and it was the first native (ish) Linux productivity suite, but it was buggy and unstable.

But then Corel did a fateful deal with the enemy. With Microsoft.

To improve adoption of WordPerfect Office on Windows, some gullible Corel boss was persuaded that what WPO needed was to be more compatible with MS Office. And the way to do that was to license the Office look and feel, i.e. the custom menus and toolbars, and the Visual BASIC for Applications macro language.

(Aside: you should realise that VBA was bolted on to MS Office when Office was quite mature. Word had its own macro language, WordBasic. Excel had its own too, similar to Lotus 1-2-3 in-cell macros. These were ripped out and replaced with VBA. For a while Excel could run _both_. That's what Corel did too... only it didn't even own the code it replaced its macro languages with.)

Corel licensed VBA and the look and feel and bolted them onto WPO for Windows. It paid a lot. Tens of millions, US.

But Microsoft insisted that Corel kill off all its Linux work as a result.

And Corel bought it. So it killed WPO for Linux... and CorelDraw for Linux and its other Linux apps. It killed WordPerfect for Linux, the native port. It killed the NetWinder and it killed LinuxOS. A lot of people lost their jobs.

The NetWinder and LinuxOS got sold off.

Corel LinuxOS became Xandros, also a damned good distro, but with no WordPerfect and no big-company backing. There were 2 more releases then it died.

The NetWinder sold some units as a thin client and then died.

But Microsoft had eliminated the only serious rival desktop OS that existed and it got paid money to do so!

And all this did Corel little good, because Microsoft just switched out the look-and-feel in the next version of Office anyway. If you install all the versions next to each other, they all look different.

Office 4 for Windows 3 just looked like a native Windows 3 app.

Office 95 had custom skins and title bars and buttons, so it looked more like a Win95 app with weird title bars.

Office 97 dropped the fancy styled title bars but made buttons squarer and so on, brought in tooltips everywhere, and switched all the file formats so you had to upgrade.

Office 2000 brought in the horrible self-customising menus, the edges of toolbar buttons disappeared except when hovered over... And Corel didn't get it because the licensing was not forward-looking, it was for one version only.

Office XP had "intellisense" and an unhelpful Help box and wizards everywhere instead of dialog boxes.

Office 2003 had more of the same, horrible shaded gradients in the toolbars and menus.

Office 2007 ditched menus for ribbons and I stopped using it.

Summary...

Corel LinuxOS was great, ahead of its time, but Microsoft killed it.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Brno Lesná
Current Music: cleaning

I recently read that a friend of mine claimed that "Both the iPhone and iPod were copied from other manufacturers, to a large extent."

This is a risible claim, AFAICS.

There were pocket MP3 jukeboxes before the iPod. I still own one. They were fairly tragic efforts.

There were smartphones before the iPhone. I still have at least one of them, too. Again, really tragic from a human-computer interaction point of view.

AIUI, the iPhone originated internally as a shrunk-down tablet. The tablet originated from a personal comment from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs that although tablets were a great idea, people simply didn’t want tablets because Microsoft had made them and they didn’t sell.
( Read more... )

Jobs’ response was that the Microsoft ones didn’t sell because they were no good, not because people didn’t want tablets. In particular, Jobs stated that using a stylus was a bad idea. (This is also a pointer was to why he cancelled the Newton. And guess what? I've got one of them, too.)

Gates, naturally, contested this, and Jobs started an internal project to prove him wrong: a stylus-free finger-operated slim light tablet. However, when it was getting to prototype form, he allegedly realised, with remarkable prescience, that the market wasn’t ready yet, and that people needed a first step — a smaller, lighter, simpler, pocketable device, based on the finger-operated tablet.

Looking for a role or function for such a device, the company came up with the idea of a smartphone.

Smartphones certainly existed, but they were a geek toy, nothing more.

Apple was bold enough to make a move that would kill its most profitable line — the iPod — with a new product. Few would be so bold.

I can’t think of any other company that would have been bold enough to invent the iPhone. We might have got to devices as capable as modern smartphones and tablets, but I suspect they’d have still been festooned in buttons and a lot clumsier to use.

It’s the GUI story again. Xerox sponsored the invention and original development but didn’t know WTF to do with it. Contrary to the popular history, it did productise it, but as a vastly expensive specialist tool. It took Apple to make it the standard method of HCI, and it took Apple two goes and many years. The Lisa was still too fancy and expensive, and the original Mac too cut-down and too small and compromised.

The many rivals’ efforts were, in hindsight, almost embarrassingly bad. IBM’s TopView was a pioneering GUI and it was rubbish. Windows 1 and 2 were rubbish. OS/2 1.x was rubbish, and to be honest, OS/2 2.x was the pre-iPhone smartphone of GUI OSes: very capable, but horribly complex and fiddly.

Actually, arguably — and demonstrably, from the Atari ST market — DR GEM was a far better GUI than Windows 1 or 2. GEM was a rip-off of the Mac; the PC version got sued and crippled as a result, so blatant was it. It took MS over a decade to learn from the Mac (and GEM) and produce the first version of Windows with a GUI good enough to rival the Mac’s, while being different enough not to get sued: Windows 95.

Now, 2 decades later, everyone’s GUI borrows from Win95. Linux is still struggling to move on from Win95-like desktops, and even Mac OS X, based on a product which inspired Win95, borrows some elements from the Win95 GUI.

Everyone copies MS, and MS copies Apple. Apple takes bleeding-edge tech and turns geek toys into products that the masses actually want to buy.

Microsoft’s success is founded on the IBM PC, and that was IBM’s response to the Apple ][.

Apple has been doing this consistently for about 40 years. It often takes it 2 or 3 goes, but it does.

First time: 8-bit home micros (the Apple ][, an improved version of a DIY kit.)

Second time: GUIs (first the Lisa, then the Mac).

Third time: USB (on the iMac, arguably the first general-purpose PC designed and sold for Internet access as its primary function).

Fourth time: digital music players (the iPod wasn’t even the first with a hard disk).

Fifth time: desktop Unix (OS X, based on NeXTstep).

Sixth time: smartphones (based on what became the iPad, remember).

Seventh time: tablets (the iPad, actually progenitor of the iPhone rather than the other way round).

Yes, there are too many Mac fans, and they’re often under-informed. But there are also far to many Microsoft apologists, and too many Linux ones, too.

I use an Apple desktop, partly because with a desktop, I can choose my own keyboard and pointing device. I hate modern Apple ones.

I don’t use Apple laptops or phones. I’ve owned multiple examples of both. I prefer the rivals.

My whole career has been largely propelled by Microsoft products. I still use some, although my laptops run Linux, which I much prefer.

I am not a fanboy of any of them, but sadly, anyone who expresses fondness or admiration for anything Apple will be inevitably branded as one by the Anti-Apple fanboys, whose ardent advocacy is just as strong and just as irrational.

As will this.

I went looking for video interviews of Steve Jobs and found rather more. Many years ago, I read Accidental Empires by "Robert X Cringely". I knew it had been made into a US TV series way back in 1996, but I'd never paid much attention - and I never saw a mention of it on UK TV, not that I am a big TV-watcher.

But all three parts of the adaptation, Triumph of the Nerds, are on Youtube as full-length episodes. None of that painful piecing-together-from-chunks.

Stuffed with marvellous clips of many industry pioneers - not just then-youthful big names such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, John Sculley and so on, but some of the techs from behind the scenes as well: Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, John Warnock, Tim Patterson, Gary Kildall and a handful of the IBMers behind the IBM PC.

Well worth 150min of your time.

Sadly, I can't find a single-part version of the sequel, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet.

( Embedded videos behind the cut. )

Short links...
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFL9IyJ_qHk
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbRmaIzGTOM
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Bg461mnN8

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The real reason that the first version of Windows NT was called 3.1
The first try at "an Ubuntu" -- Corel LinuxOS
This will get me accused of fanboyism (again), but like it or not, Apple shaped the PC industry.
Triumph of the Nerds

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Liam on Linux

Liam Proven's thoughts on IT, especially FOSS

Entries tagged with microsoft

The real reason that the first version of Windows NT was called 3.1

The first try at "an Ubuntu" -- Corel LinuxOS

This will get me accused of fanboyism (again), but like it or not, Apple shaped the PC industry.

Triumph of the Nerds