Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try

The previous posts of this serie have been discussed on HN:<p>* Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17403351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17403351</a>) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17423724" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17423724</a>) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17470844" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17470844</a>) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17523926" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17523926</a>)

Excel installing a captive Windows, a technical detail they could have hid, was instead played up to demo the windowing GUI, in a better implementation of shareware than nearly anything that came after. This ingenious decision really ought to be more widely known and celebrated, but seems to have fallen out of the abbreviated narrative around Windows&#x27; (or Excel&#x27;s) history, and it takes specialized sources like this one, or books by Excel gurus [1] to talk more about this fact.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA8&amp;lpg=PA8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=3Uz7CAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA8&amp;lpg=PA...</a>

Two thoughts.<p>1. I can&#x27;t get over how primitive the Windows UI was compared to Mac years after Mac shipped. Apple began the Macintosh project in late &#x27;79 and by Jan &#x27;84 shipped both the Mac and the OS. Microsoft began Windows development in &#x27;81 and didn&#x27;t really catch up UI-wise till Windows 3 in 1990. Meanwhile, Apple would squander its head start, not shipping an OS as technically sound as NT (1993) till OS X in 2000.<p>2. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost kills Microsoft going all in on OS&#x2F;2. Was Microsoft successful in spite of him?

I never liked the PS&#x2F;1 and PS&#x2F;2 things IBM did.<p>It seemed like an obvious attempt to try to snare customers into a closed system. I never knew however that IBM tried to snare in Microsoft too.<p>An interesting read for sure.

Interesting that Excel was developed first for the Mac. Excel also used p-code [1][2] for its cross-platform abilities:<p>&quot;had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh’s 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs.&quot;<p>It would be interesting to see the first version of excel on Mac, the windows version in the article looks very familiar.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;in-defense-of-not-...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9254060" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9254060</a>

Ballmer could have sink Microsoft in 1986. Didn’t knew that but makes sense. How many long term bids are we missing in 2018 because Ballmer-like executives are now in power ?

I assume that some variant of &quot;bundled Windows Runtime&quot; is the reason why trial versions of various of various productivity SW that came with my first PC had MZ stubs, that didn&#x27;t print &quot;This program requires Microsoft Windows&quot;, but EXEC&#x27;d something like &quot;%COMSPEC% &#x2F;C WIN.COM PROGRAM.EXE&quot;

At the time, Lotus was faced with a choice on where to go with Lotus 1-2-3: OS&#x2F;2, Windows, or text mode. They backed the wrong horse. They were a big company at the time, could have easily bet on all three, and stayed in business.

As the years go by, and new stories like this come out, I find increasingly growing respect for Bill Gates.

I love how un-apologetically &quot;skeumorphic&quot; this blog is. Ah, I miss the days...

How do you flag something as a dupe?

Odd, posted this yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17576304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17576304</a>

There is literally not a single comment addressing the content here at this moment :)<p>Yes, I&#x27;m not helping