Microsoft erases Windows 8 optimism

Microsoft has apparently killed a Microsoft employee's blog posting eulogizing its planned successor to Windows 7. The MSDN post that was here and has been cached here, according to Microsoft Kitchen, was thin on details but provided possibly the first hint of how Microsoft plans to pitch the successor to Windows 7. The take …

[Flybert]

won't be called Windows 8

jus' too stoopid .. yu'll get 2 much of

"Windows 8 my 'puter"

"Windows L8r"

"Windows h8 .."

"Windows sed8ed"

Reg headlines like

"Windows R8s Low On Mind Blow Scale"

"Window Users Ir8 ....."

the horror .. the horror

[Anonymous Coward]

More Publicity

the fact the post has been removed creates more publicity then the post being left alone

[Misoriented]

Ya don't say?

It's almost as if they did it on purpose...

Clearly marketers shouldn't blog. They just sound like marketers instead of human beings.

[Rob McDougall]

so...

...it was intentional...!

[Keith T]

Just make it work!

Windows 8 should be about handling new hardware, new programming tools, security, efficiency, and ease of use.

Please leave the flashing 3D inter-dimensional blink-to-click wizardry out.

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"Welcome to the _cloud_, we got fun 'n' games"

[Ihre Papiere Bitte!!]

Letters? Digits? What's wrong with kanji, dammit?

I see what you did there.

"We got everything you want.... well, some of it. Ish. Kinda."

(I'd apologise to Axl Rose for mutilating the lyrics, but he's a dick, so I won't...)

[Destroy All Monsters]

"Expect something completely different"

No, no ... wasn't that "Beware of unforeseen consequences"??

Vortigaunt logo. Or something.

[Unlimited]

Actual Expectations:

An overpriced resource hog which adds nothing of benefit to the users computing experience

[N2]

Perhaps

Windows 8 will be something genuinely new, no registry to screw it and Internet Explorer 9.0 free from problems?

Maybe not

[RichyS]

Re: Perhaps

Exactly. Microsoft have cried wolf too many times.

Does anyone believe them anymore?

[James Hughes 1]

Nah.

All the Microsoft (non-)believers have moved on to hating Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Something completely different

Something completely different? Ah, that means huge user retraining costs, a deluge of application incompatibilities, and a hiatus in delievring genuinely beneficial benefits to businesses and end users.

Whilst the needs of the MS business machine to generate profits by forcing users into regular upgrades of their software may have a certain commercial logic, the benefits to businesses who have to comply with this insatiable hunger are distinctly questionable. The geeks at Redmond may crave the frisson of a new User Interface in which every useful feature is cunningly accessible only somewhere completely unexpected, but for most of the hundreds of millions of PC users, this is just an impediment to doing their jobs effectiively. It may also be good for the IT Services sector - but surely all this effeort could be better spent delivering real business benefits rather than change for change's sake.

How about just fixing the issues with the current version and NOT making everything "completely different"?

[Usko Kyykka]

... : The Larch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larch

[Tony Paulazzo]

Windows 8

Will automatically create a root (sorry Admin) and low permission user account at installation then claim its security features are second to none....

Either that, or it will have giant ribbons cluttering up the screen, a redesigned task bar and a start triangle.

It will also return the users ability to de-tick the task bar's 'always on top' option, taken away 'by design' for windows 7, even tho it's been there since Windows 95 and some users found it useful. Especially in the era of 9-12 inch touch-screens and net-books - they really are twats, IMHO, and no, I won't use the 'hide taskbar' option - my windows my way my a¬5e...

Copyright Me!

[John Sanders]

MS and Windows

Reminds me of the Spanish politicos, always making huge promises, people buy it and it turns they need to make some more promises as the old promises were not so good.

The next Windows will be the best windows ever.... bah, it will be another annoying bunch of changes for the sake of change, on an even more and more black box platform.

I'm with the penguin now, it has its issues too, but no one hides them, and most get fixed soon enough.

[Mike Echo]

surreal?

My vote for the most annoying and misused adjective of late goes to 'surreal', as in "...to come up with a vision for Windows.next is a process that is surreal...".

[Ammaross Danan]

KDE/GNOME

What cool new features did KDE or Gnome add to their UI recently? Now take that list, write "New GUI Improvements to Windows 8" at the top, put it in a PowerPoint, and you'll have the keynotes for the Windows 8 launch party!

Don't believe me? They snuck in tab-completion and directory coloring to the command prompt, as well as program grouping on the taskbar for XP just after KDE did it....

[rhdunn]

Follow the white gnome...

Agreed.

Have you noticed that the Vista "crumb" bar is just a snazzier version of what Gnome has had for ages in the file open/save dialogs and nautilus?

Have you noticed that the compact file save dialog in Vista looks the same as the one in Gnome?

Have you noticed that the Vista tree control (e.g. for folder navigation in Explorer) uses arrows like the Gnome version does?

Windows 8 introducing zeitgeist and Gnome Shell features? Throw in some of the KDE4 support for semantic data (RDF, FoaF, linked in, ...)?

[Ocular Sinister]

They could just cut and paste this

http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks to me...

...as though KDE have copied ideas from both Microsoft AND Apple! Before I begin, none of this is actually that important, or indeed relevant to the article. Who do did what first is largely irrelevant, who has best implemented a technology is what matters - stupid patents aside. Like it or not, Microsoft have done a good job with the Windows 7 UI; with some of the idea's actually being introduced in Vista. For the sake of entertainment, lets examine your collective musing and apply it retrospectively. KDE 4 (and the Gnome project, XFCE or the other spawn of CDE) have lifted ideas from both Microsoft and Apple, amongst many others. In fact the whole WIMP paradigm was "lifted" (actually it was purchased) from PARC; who in turn had 'hijacked' (with good salaries!) the research team fro the SRI that had helped develop Engelbart's On-Line System; who had originally been inspired by Ivan Sutherland and Vannevar Bush; the latter incidentally really being the forefather of hypertext and the modern internet. Since KDE was initially developed in 1998, your argument is moot; it'd be fair to say using your hive logic that the original look and feel of KDE was heavily borrowed from Windows 98, with ideas lifted from CDE (a HP VUE 'clone'), NeXTStep, BeOS and Workbench to name check a few others. So ner ner ne-ner ner! KDE iz teh kopia!!! Honestly...

[BristolBachelor]

Chicago anyone ?

I've heard it all before.

Chicago is going to be brilliant, completely different, imppossible to be infected with a virus (!) ...

Vista is going to be amazing. It will completely change the way you use your computer. You will never loose things ever again with Microsoft's new database filing system....

I upgraded to Win2K when it was absolutely necessary to use USB. I haven't seen anything since that would convince me to "upgrade" since, and my laptop running Vista keeps reminding me I'd be better with Win2K.

[Usko Kyykka]

Hdesnaxnkolv Pzöchf (<- this is what you get for requiring a title)

>Chicago ...

>Vista ...

I seem to recall that "Chicago" was to Win95 as "Phallus symbol" was to Vista. At any rate they are similar: promises on a cosmic scale, real benefits subject to quantum effects.

[Choice of icon due to exposure to Bayonetta (PS3).]

[Sureo]

"redited" means what?

Just asking.

[Adrian Esdaile]

Party like it's 1999!

"The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs..."

Didn't they say that in about 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999-2001 inclusive? (during which they gave us ME *shudder*)

You'd think with all this changing the way we think about computers we'd all be confused by now.

AHAH! Got it! They're going to change the way you get the system working after it's crashed to CTRL-ALT-DEL-F5-MIDDLEMOUSEBUTTON!

[Matt 53]

Oops, mis-read the opening line

Microsoft has apparently killed a Microsoft employee [for] blog posting...

Not sure that would have surprised me!

[Bill Neal]

John Mangelaars!?

So, it seems the infamous "cock mongler" or "grin man" of chan fandom actually works for micro$oft. Amazing

[Remy Redert]

Listening to the customers

So then they'll finally make a slick, streamlined OS that uses an absolute minimum of system resources to provide a GUI, very high stability, proper multi-user support and extremely high compatibility with whatever we want to stick in?

Without any of the DRM crud, bloatware and the usual plethora of preventable security bugs?

Seems unlikely.

[Allan George Dyer]

Yes, they are!

They're going to stick a Windows logo on Linux.

OK, thanks, just throw my coat out after me...

[Stuart Elliott]

To follow on from the OP

Windows 8 my hamster!

[Anonymous Coward]

Timely leak

Only there's this slight stumbling gap between marketeering shenanigans and delivering a moreso than usually crap product half a decade late. The very fact that people still believe, nay still and desperately /want/ to believe micros~1 drivel is an ode to humanity's gullibility. Does exploiting suckers deserve the respect billg gets? Discuss.

[jake]

I have seen the future of my PCs.

I use it every day, in fact ... and it didn't come from Redmond.

Or Cupertino, for that matter.

[Steven Knox]

And now for something completely different...

Its...

Microsoft Corporation's Flagship Program!

Oh, come on, someone had to...

[Dork Lard]

And now for something completely different...

An operating system with three buttocks!

[Tarthen]

Windows 8

...should be uncluttered, fast, have a decent web browser bundled, the ability to burn .iso images and have a quick startup and shutdown.

The less time it takes to burn the Linux CD, the better. :)

[Tim Bates]

And now for something completely different

MS has been at it for years claming their OSes will rock your world. On release, the only reason the world gets rocked is because everyone gets frustrated at some setting or feature being removed.

Where do I want to go today? Pretty much away from Microsoft's marketing department.

[Mikel]

Windows.not

Development of Windows.next started in 1991, and has taken lessons learned from NT, XP, Vista and Windows 7 as well as Solaris, Linux, BSD and Mac OS-X.

W.next will embrace a robust and diverse marketplace by providing and connecting to open interfaces in a well documented and robust manner. The visual interface will be stunning. It will run on architectures from routers to cell phones, thin clients, ATMs, fighter jet consoles, automobile dashboards, embedded television processors, media centers, desktops, servers, blade servers, cloud clusters and HPC superclusters and more. It will do all of these things well. It will be robust, with no launch day exploits, bugs or crashes thanks to its commitment to ownership of the driver stack. Its network stack will be impeccable - they've run it against every known exploit and bug, every fuzzing algorithm, the NSA, CIA, several other TLAs and over 200 AI enhanced positive feedback self-educating attack bots. It will support every common filesystem including NTFS, HPFS, ZFS, EXT3, EXT4, and many more. It will even boot from the network.

W.Next will include a full suite of office applications that use open file formats, intuitive interface design, connectivity with all open applications. It will come with a vendor-neutral installation client with its own search engine which will tap vendor certified and third-party repositories and leverage apt-url for painless installation of any application. Of course it will include installers for all your favorite development environments including gcc, perl, Python, Ruby, Sun Java, MySQL, Postgres and more! A full application development environment will be an easy install, for dozens of programming languages. Users will be able to create their own spins on W.Next and share them with all their friends.

You will be able to choose your install image from a 50MB business-card CD .ISO to a completely full BDROM, HD-DVD or 7-DVD set, all of which will be seeded on bittorrent on launch day, legally because W.next is free.

All this and more! It will be completely fabulous. Oh, wait. It already is.

[Anonymous Coward]

version x+1

From an MS internal document

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958

9: Final Release:

Evangelism of a given technology usually ends with the final, shipping release of that technology. One last big press event, with demos, a tradeshow, press releases, etc., is often called for, showcasing the apps that are sim-shipping and the customers that are using them. In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.

[Anonymous Coward]

Goals but no way to achieve those

That "post" was obviously a re-run from Chicago advertising and thus removing it was nothing but a buzz-creating gimmick.

So many buzzwords in short article makes it very clear that it was a bait: I'll bet that 10 times more people read it from cache than ever read when it was in it's original place: Mission accomplished.

Lot of feelings and happines in article, not a word of how to achieve those. I'm not surprised, they don't know that themselves either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing will change things as usual

We all know that Microsoft marketing can't go a single release without changing numbering schemes. They might go back to Windows 2011, or Windows 11, or Windows 7.1, or some other goofy combination of letters or names. But, most likely not Windows 8.

[unitron]

I know what it'll be!

Windows 7 Come 11 Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes! (point 1, service pack 3)

Mine's the one with the two small, black-dotted white, (slightly off-balance) cubes in the secret pocket.

[this]

And now...

for something completely different!

[John Smith 19]

"We listened to our customers"

Intel said make it *need* a 2GHz quad core processor as a *minimum*.

The drive makers said have it take up at *least* 10GB.

The RAM suppliers said it needs a footprint of at least 2GB.

[lucmars]

Unclear roadmap

Before we had the Service Pack, now we have Windows n but where are the SPs?

Windows7 is the latest Vista'SP, so what can we think about a rumored Windows n++ ? Is it just a disguised SP or something new ?

From Redmond it's rather unusual to label Windows in such incremental way which usually means either an update or a major upgrade.

They should stick to a big name each time they pretend to something new. Would they go until Windows10 or let this number to the Apple's distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind blowing upgrade to Solitaire...

...and Minesweeper has been given a really mind blowing GUI plus we're bringing back Othello and support for 1.44MB floppy drives because of input from our users. Oh yeah, and there is a raft of real cool screensavers because Microsoft believes that it is very important to...er...save your screens. Mind blowing stuff, really.

Paris, 'cause she can blow my mind any time.

[Kerberos]

Freetards

Why do you tux worshipping idiots have to dump your propaganda in every single thread that mentions Windows on the entire Internet? Not only that it is lies, damn lies and FUD of a magnitude that would make SCO blush.

We all know about Linux as it's impossible to avoid the idiots who think making a clean-room copy of Unix, cloning the userland, copying the Windows 95 UI and then copying (badly) the apps and games from other systems somehow makes them original, while Windows, which is the only OS that isn't a copy of Unix, is somehow a ripoff.

Sorry for the blogspam, but I wrote a post about this:

http://piestar.net/2009/12/07/microsoft-vs-originality/

Also, Remy Redert, whenever I talk about problems with Unix (aside from 'bugs') I get told to shut up - 'f**k off it's free' they say. Hardly listening to your customers.

Everyone knows about Linux yet still nobody uses it - maybe this should tell you something.

[Piro]

So, we can expect more kludges, then..

Such as Windows XP Mode.

Surely if Windows already keeps versioned copies of dlls for compatibility, it can do similar for XP, kind of like Wine does, instead of running an entire virtual machine, which is ridiculous.

We can also expect more UI changes and inconsistencies just for the sake of it. Put the back button next to the next button? Haha, no, MOVED. Control Panel still an utter mess of different, seperate applications, with tabs that are differently coloured because they were old and nobody checked? You bet. I like to piss on Steve Jobs' fire as much as the next guy, but at least OS X's control panel resembles something a sensible person would come up with, unlike any version of Windows.

[Geoff Campbell]

Wow, what a lot of whining and bitching.

It's very simple, people - if you don't like Windows, use something else. I like it, especially Windows 7, so I use it on my main machines. Other machines, with other requirements, I use Linux of various flavours.

You don't have to prove how clever you all are by constantly bitching about Microsoft. to me, that proves something rather different....

Oh, and whilst we're on the subject, why does everyone go on about Microsoft's business model being predicated on constant upgrades? Yes, it is, because they've sold Windows and Office to pretty much everyone in the world, and no-one wants a subscription model for PC software. But the same is true of most manufacturing companies, yet you don't hear analysts whining on about how bad it is that Ford's business model is predicated on everyone constantly upgrading.

GJC

(Tux, because I couldn't find an excuse to use Paris. As it were.)

[G_C]

A Microsoft Marketing Balloon Dance?

How very Burlesque...

I think we're all a bit too sharp to fall for that little trick...

stick a pin in it... second thoughts... don't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Winblows

"One of the great (or maybe not so great) things of being at Microsoft is that every other person wants to ask you why Windows works the way it does"

Urm, perhaps what he was meaning to say was "why Windows doesn't work as often as it should".

Of course everyone wants to ask him why Windows is so different from other operating systems - probably not in a good way though!

"The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completly different from what folks usually expect of Windows"

What? It's going to work, not be bloated, not require anything as brain-dead and nonsensical as the registry, not clutter my screen with "ribbons" while getting rid of the perfectly usable menus etc

While I'm thinking about it, why are the menus in IE7 not at the top of the window? Answers on a postcard...

[Satan P Coolsborough]

"expect something completely different"

Steve Ballmer is growing a mustache?

[Mike Flugennock]

re: something completely different

...or, perhaps it'll be revealed that Ballmer has three buttocks?

[Ascylto]

Hurrah!

Windows 8:

"what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs..."

"to listen to our customers needs and wants and get a team together than can make it happen."

AT LAST!

Oh ... wait ...

[cookieMonster]

One word ...

MEH !!

[Cameron Colley]

Stop fscking changing!

I don't know anyone who has changed the way they use computers due to the user-interface flashy bollocks that Microsoft, the KDE and Gnome teams, et al have introduced to their desktops. I only know of people who either say "oh, I like this" and go on as they were, those who get excited about how good their PC is because it can do the graphical stuff and show it off, then get fed up and carry on as normal or those, like myself, who haven't seen the need for any of the windowing system changes since the days of Windows 3.1.

As someone said above -- just make it work, damn it!

[alyn]

What I would like to see...

The feature I would most like to see is for Windows to abandon the MeSs-DOS drive letters A:- Z: for a Unix-like contiguous file system. What features would others want?

Alyn

[LawLessLessLaw]

Unified tree - been there ten years

You can mount any drive as a folder since win2k

[jake]

@LawLessLessLaw

"You can mount any drive as a folder since win2k"

I think "join" and "subst" came out in MS-DOS 3.0 or 3.1 ... That'd be mid '84 or early '85ish, about a decade and a half before Win2K. Certainly by the time of MS-DOS 3.3, I was using them quite a bit in batch files to set up the system to suit the needs of whatever project I was working on at the time.

[Mike Hanna]

Good, bad, good, bad...

Do you think MicroShaft allow the format of their products to switch from good to bad, and include that in their business plans?

Win95 - good take-up (cos it was new and shiny)

Win98 - slated until the Second Edition was released

WinXP - still used by most people 10 years later

WinVista - Worst.OS.Ever?

Win7 - great take-up

Win8 - gonna be a stinker

Do 2000 and ME count? I kinda always thought of them as just add-on packs for Win98 and not included them above...

And if Win95 was the next incarnation after 3.11 does that make it Windows 4? Therefore Win98 = Win5, again ignoring the add-ons that were Win2000 and WinME, WinXP = Win6, Vista = Win7 and Win7 = Win8?!

I've not tried Vista or Win7 yet. Is Win7 just the same as Vista but with some patches? Perhaps MicroShaft have been telling us all along tnat they are exactly the same thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Misinformation...

Windows ME might have been similar to Win 98 but with added bells & whistles however Windows 2000 was most definitly not.

Win2K was based on Windows NT, completely different to the 95,98,ME heritage. Win2K is in fact closer to Windows XP, and in my recollection it was well recieved. I remember many in 2001 deriding Windows XP for being bloated and resource hungry (almost word perfect the same as the flak Vista got) and declaring they would stick with 2000 cos XP was a dog... funny how things come around again...

As I recall:

Windows 95 - Shiny

Windows 98 - Buggy

Windows 98 SE - Better but suffering from it's DOS+GUI roots

(Windows NT - Successful on servers etc)

Windows ME - DOS+GUI no longer viable - rubbish OS

Windows 2000 - Well recieved

Windows XP - Initally derided as a bogged down version of 2000, SP1 helped and SP2 was actually quite good.

Windows Vista - Initially buggy and resource hungry, got better with time. Too many 3rd party driver issues ruined user experience.

Windows 7 - A little speedier than Vista but better recieved now average hardware has moved on so it didn't feel slow, good features and works well.

[jake]

@iamafish re: Win2k

"Win2K is in fact closer to Windows XP, and in my recollection it was well recieved"

The NT version known as "Win2K" is flat out, hands-down, the best OS that Microsoft ever released. It is currently running on the only remaining Microsoft based-box here at chez jake ... and has been, for nearly 10 years with no BSODs, no malware problems, and no OS reinstalls, and only gets rebooted occasionally (usually when I need to vacuum out the horse/dog/cat hair ...). Needless to say, she has been airgapped for several years ;-)

XP is 2K's younger, fussier, more gussied up baby brother. It's NT's roots that keeps XP on desktops all over the world ...

[Reg Varney]

WinVista = Worst OS Ever?

You haven't lived: Try CP/M & BOS and then tell me Vista is worse.

[Peter Gathercole]

Don't compare apples and oranges

You cannot compare the two. Although CP/M was a pig to use in hindsight (who remembers PIP), it was very like it's peers, and possibly a bit better (certainly from version 2.2 onward). It was so good for it's time, in fact, that Seattle Computer copied it to create their DOS (DOS is too frequently used to me meaningful without context), which was noticed by Microsoft, and the rest is history.

Of course, CP/M was a rip-of of previous systems like Digital Equipment Corp.'s RT/11, which it self was a derivative of one of their PDP/8 OS's.

But in those days, an OS was really an application launcher, pure and simple. A lot of people I knew actually did not use the OS at all, but just created (or got a friend to create) a bootable disk that automatically launched whatever application it was they needed. So you had a WordStar disk, and a VisiCalc disk, an MS Basic disk etc. Once you were in the app. you never left it until you saved your file, and turned the computer off.

[Peter Kay]

pip m:=b:*.* [v]

Pip could have been worse; it had a lot more functionality than copy, but the fact it wasn't built into the command processor was a tad annoying. Not to mention the lack of directories in the file system.. The destination, source syntax didn't help either.

I'm not sure that it really mattered that CP/M lost out. Perhaps DOS was better architected in some ways, but early releases of DOS were fairly basic too. I suspect in the end architecture mattered more than OS.

[Keith Wingate]

Now that you mention it...

Um, sorry, but I spent my first year or so in computerdom using CP/M and as I recall, it did work.

(If you remembered to "warm boot" when you changed 5" or 8" diskettes :-) ).

In my experience, the same cannot be said for Vista.

[John 30]

@ Mike Hanna

Vista - Very Integrated but Slow, Troublesome Atrocity?

I weren't none too fond of ME, I stayed with NT until my wife moaned that it wouldn't see her MP3 player (USB).

Expect the next incarnarnation to be i-something, everybody else is doing it.

[Jess--]

Dont discount win 2000

everything from win 95 through to XP was to introduce the look & feel that NT already had, microsoft knew that the old dos + gui had no future and needed a method of migrating users over to an NT based operating system.

up until 2001 microsoft had 2 seperate (and increasingly incompatible) operating system technologies, with windows xp they finally managed to migrate everyone to the same technology.

Most people forget about the NT operating systems (including win 2000) because they were pitched as commercial operating systems rather than domestic.

windows 3.11 (1992) dos based

NT 3.1 (1993) NT based

windows 95 (1995) dos based

NT 4 (1996) NT based

windows 98 (1998) dos based

windows 2000 (2000) NT based (internal identifier NT5)

windows ME (2000) dos based

windows xp (2001) NT based (internal identifier NT5.1)

for the pedants out there I do know that NT is just a re-badged version of OS2 that came into existence when Microsoft and IBM fell out (somewhere I still have 12 inch laserdiscs for installing OS2)

[Peter Kay]

12" laserdiscs...? Seriously?

That's a new one on me; I can't think why it would exist. 3.5" and 5.25" for the pre 2.x stuff and CD in 2.x onwards yes, but laserdisc?

I'll grant OS/2 Extended Edition did feature quite a lot of disks, but it wasn't so much of a problem to use them.

[John Smith 19]

@Jess..

"for the pedants out there I do know that NT is just a re-badged version of OS2 that came into existence when Microsoft and IBM fell out (somewhere I still have 12 inch laserdiscs for installing OS2)"

I think you'll find NT is modelled (pretty closely) on the DEC VMS system as the most (if not all) of the core developers for it mvoed to MS shortly before.

As for OS/2 I've no idea what its influences were. Obviously the developer were aware of Unix and other reliable OS's but which ones were used is unclera.

BTW OS/2 is still avaialbe and under development but it's changed its name to something else and been licensed/sold off to soemone else.

[jake]

@John Smith 19

"I think you'll find NT is modelled (pretty closely) on the DEC VMS system as the most (if not all) of the core developers for it mvoed to MS shortly before."

The OS that became NT started life with the intention of becoming OS/2 3.0 ... until Windows 3.0 took off, and MS wanted to include the Windows APIs into it. IBM had a frombie and split out of the project ... probably because IBM and Apple were dating at the time (anyone but me remember Taligent & Pink?).

MS hired Dave Cutler and his team to write the core of the new OS after they bailed out of DEC (some say MS recruited them out of DEC, but I doubt it) when DEC's management were obviously driving the company into the ground (lots of us left DEC around then ...). Dave is probably the best OS architect ever born (despite hating UNIX-style stuff ... All you fanbois who want a MS-branded UNIX-like OS, faggedaboudit as long as Dave works for MS). It's a shame he didn't strike out on his own ... If he had, in the ensuing 20+ years, we'd have something absolutely amazing running all our desktops by now. MS and Apple (and maybe Linux & BSD) would be footnotes in history ... which may be why Bill Gates hired him in the first place ;-)

"As for OS/2 I've no idea what its influences were. Obviously the developer were aware of Unix and other reliable OS's but which ones were used is unclera."

OS/2 was originally an IBM/Microsoft collaboration designed to provide a new OS taking advantage of the architecture of IBM's new PS/2 line of computers. Basically, it was supposed to be a 32-bit version of MS/PC-DOS, running in "protected mode" natively. It was moderately useful out of the gate, but was so unlike PC-DOS that most folks shied away from it.

"BTW OS/2 is still avaialbe and under development but it's changed its name to something else and been licensed/sold off to soemone else."

That would be eComStation, marketed by Serenity Systems. It is more than moderately useful, I use it occasionally. I might use it more, if ECS 2.0 ever gets released.

[John Smith 19]

@Jake

<Lots of stuff snipped>

Pretty much how I heard the story. I remember (dimly) Pink and Taligent but AFIK it *ever* got released to any actual developers outside Apple or IBM. I've seen reports comparing the NT function names with those in VMS and they are a *close* match in many cases.

"OS/2 was originally an IBM/Microsoft collaboration designed to provide a new OS taking advantage of the architecture of IBM's new PS/2 line of computers. Basically, it was supposed to be a 32-bit version of MS/PC-DOS, running in "protected mode" natively. "

I'd forgotten about PS/2. The thing I remeber about OS/2 was it was meant to be hosted on a 286 and MS came up with a near impossible hack to allow apps to shift *back* from protected mode, which was *never* expected to happen in normal operation after booting up.

"That would be eComStation,"

I could not remember the name except it was *very* different to being called OS/2. Someone I met in the US mentioned it has a fair following in various local government and banking.

Thanks for the reminder of things gone by.

Regarding Pink/taligent. It always seemed odd to me that they did not consider using another OS which supported object orientation, object level security, dynamic linking and a highly structured command syntax, not to mention a well integrated database.

But then OS400 was never pitched as a technical marvel, just a good way of running a business without any trouble.

[jake]

Memories ...

"The thing I remeber about OS/2 was it was meant to be hosted on a 286"

You've jogged my memory ... yes, it did run on 286s ... and the first variations even ran (kinda, for small values of "run") on 8086s ...

"and MS came up with a near impossible hack to allow apps to shift *back* from protected mode, which was *never* expected to happen in normal operation after booting up."

Oh, gawd/ess ... Now I'll have nightmares for weeks. It wasn't MS that came up with the hack, it was IBM ...they essentially used the keyboard controller and an out-of-bandwith chunk of writable memory (clock RAM? VLB RAM? Something like that ... Has been a while ...) to save the state of the system before going into protected mode. Ugly, ugly, ugly ... but very functional hack ... IF you used IBM's proprietary hardware. They should have designed the hardware properly in the first place.

Me, in the same timeframe for MS/IBM/Intel, I ran DOS 5.0, 4DOS, QEMM, and DesqView on a generic 8meg 386sx16 (with math-co; I still have it, and it still runs). It even ran Windows 3.0 in a "window" without problems ... Was faster "seat of the pants" than the 32Meg 3/260 Sun Workstation I used at work, and a hell of a lot more useful than the vaxen I left behind at DEC. My home connectivity box was either an AT&T 3B1, or a 386 running MWC's Coherent (The DOS 5.0 box connected thru' one of the UN*X machines). All of these overlapped in the mid-late '80s & very early '90s ... Was an interesting time :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

@Stuart Elliott

How about the advertising slogan for the server edition?

"R8 My Rack"

They could even get the domain name for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never seen that?

Try googling "Rate My Rack"

Although "Windows 8 - has great funbags" might be a winner with some demographics.

[Neil 6]

Windows 8

More mind, less blow please

[Robert Carnegie]

They're afraid that Vista users will wait out Windows 7 for next version???

@Keith T

"Windows 8 should be about handling new hardware, new programming tools, security, efficiency, and ease of use."

I expect and demand any new hardware support and security features for existing supported Windows versions, including XP and Vista.

@Tony Paulazzo

I suppose there are alternatives to the taskbar. I sympathise, but always on top seems right to me. To hide it, on the other hand, means all your windows getting moved around when it appears and disappears. Slow. You can and I do put it on any other edge of the screen. And one particular tool, AutoHotkey (free download), might be able to help you - if you can get it to find the taskbar "window" and tell it to do what you want it to do, not what it wants to do. Or get it to tell the top window to be really on top. In fact I use AutoHotkey in Windows XP to repeatedly (1) tell the on-screen touchscreen keyboard Fitaly to park on the taskbar (otherwise it gets pushed off) AND (2) to be on top so that the taskbar isn't permanently drawn over it. If you'd like my program for that, to modify, e-mail [e-mail] (am I allowed to say that?) and be clearly not spam, or, well, Google my name and "AutoHotkey" and you'll find... several forums I don't read very often. Hmm.

[Steven 8]

What about

Vista - Worst OS Ever? Obviously you never had to do admin on NT3.51/4.0. If you're going to do a bullet list of OSes at least don't skip half, and bash the ones you've actually used.

I'll add to your list

NT3.51 (SP4) for me it was very stable, but that 3.11 interface...<Shudder>.

NT4.0 Here's a video driver. Good luck with the installation...

Win2K: Like Paradise after previous offerings. I'd like to see a poll to see how many places are still using it.

Windows 7: I'm using it now and I have no beefs, wasn't a fan of the floating gadgets. I liked them in thier own panel like vista so they're not always in the way. That was fixable so I'm good now. Win7 is actually making me think of getting rid of the PIII that I have and get some new hardware..

[phoenix]

Lets start that poll

still on w2k serverwise anyway.

[Simon Riley]

Longhorn

Sounds a lot like the promises made for Longhorn. Look how well that turned out!

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Bloody MS fanbois!

You MS fanbois are worse than the Apple ones! The merest whiff of a new mythical MS product and you're all wetting your pants in anticipation! You then have the nerve to take a pop at Job's acolytes when they start getting excited.

Sit on the fence with your popcorn and enjoy the show!

[The Commenter formally known as Matt]

What fanbois?

What MS fanbois?

All I've seen is people slagging off MS!

[Mike Flugennock]

re: MS slagging

Yeah, could be... but, let's face it, it's just so easy to slag MS. They're so... so slagworthy.

[David Lawrence]

Grammar?

Shame the blogger doesn't speak the language as she is spoke. Several schoolboy howlers committed in a couple of paragraphs. Is this indicative of the kwality we can from Widnows 8?

[heyrick]

So why should anybody bother buying Windows 7 now?

...if the mind-blowing Windows 8 is on the way. And if it is (supposedly) so good, doesn't this mean 7 is a bit of a steaming heap'o...

...you get the point. I guess this is why people (myself included) are sticking with XP. It offers longevity. All the rest? They appear to have the lifespan of a sick gerbil. And at WHAT price? And at what cost setting up your system (again) and learning the quirks of this newer version and...

[Jamie Kitson]

Was Here?

I very much doubt it was ever at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/post.aspx

I think it was probably at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharad/archive/2010/01/31/whats-in-store-for-the-next-windows.aspx

[plrndl]

Deja Vu

So this time we get the goodies that were dropped from Longhorn?

I'll believe that when I see it.

Apart from updating for modern hardware, the only worthwhile change I can see from 3.11 is long filenames. 8.3 filenames were a major pain.

[Stuart 13]

I designed Windows 8

I had this great idea, I was sitting at my desk, just over there and thought drop the flashy bollox and use an interface people can just, you know, use.

Let THEM choose if they want a new "One button dosn't do it all" feature or the old school "File, Edit, View..." where things are where they always were.

[John70]

Windows.Next

The next version of Windows should be 64 bit only.

It should be written from the ground up.

There should be NO backward compatibility built into it, no legacy crap.

For backward compatibility, Virtual PC should be used with older OS installed on it.

[Gareth.]

@John70 - RE: Windows.Next

It could be the case that Windows 8 will be 64-bit only.... Windows 2008 R2 is available in a 64-bit version only. Maybe they'll do the same for Windows 8. I certainly wouldn't complain if they did.

I know MS love their backward compatibility, and there's undoubtedly some people at Redmond who would (correctly) argue that not every home user has a 64-bit capable CPU. However, since the minimum requirements for each Microsoft OS increase exponentially with each subsequent release, I doubt that Windows 8 would run on those old CPUs anyway.

Come on, Microsoft... bite the bullet and make Windows 8 truly revolutionary. Maybe then I'll use your products more than I currently do. As it is, at the moment, I find myself using OS X and Ubuntu more than I do Windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Backwards Compatibility

Backwards Compatibility is one of the reasons Windows is so popular and Linux/OSX aren't. If MS released a version of Windows that wasn't backwards compatible businesses wouldn't take it. If you were running an IT department in a big company would you upgrade to new software when it meant that your £20000 a seat software in the CAD department doesn't run, or the specialist accounting software that, for some unknown reason, still runs from a command prompt, doesn't work. As an IT manager you want desktop homogeneity since you want everyone to get shared data, printing and application delivery through the same mechanism; but you have to cope with the fact that different people run different apps. Regardless of what you say, currently Windows is by far and away the most compatible platform and changing that would cost Microsoft considerable market share.

[Old Fart]

That was my idea for Win7

I beta tested Win7 and worked primarily on the backwards compatibility issues. The test bench I ran Win7 Ultimate on would not even run Vista Home Basic. Before the RC came out I was running hardware, and some software (games mostly) that worked in Win 98.

The big problem with Vista was the lack of computability with hardware and software that worked on the XP machine just before they "upgraded" to Vista.

So yeah, backwards compatibility is a big issue with Windows users, both consumer and businesses. Would you want to have to purchase new printers, monitors, routers, switches, and production machines every time a new OS came out?

[Bilgepipe]

Yawn

"The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs..."

More vapid guff, with no substance. As usual with Microsoft marketing BS, it contains much but says nothing. "Change the way people think about use PCs" What? What does that even mean?

I'll stick with an OS that already does what I've been looking for for years, rather than wait for Redmond to try and catch up. Again.

[Saucerhead Tharpe]

WHY IS THIS EVEN NEWS!

Every time Microsoft does this. "In case you are thinking of going to a competitor, stay with us, the next release will be mind-blowing" and often it is delayed and drops features very quickly.

mind you, the only target I can see of who gets hurt by this is Win7, I think, so far, those who are tempted by Apples or Penguins won't be swayed any less that they would be if they have decided not to go to Win7.

[Mike Flugennock]

Mind-blowing?

"Mind-blowing", huh?

Well, my previous Windows experience certainly made _my_ brain explode, that's for _damn_ sure...

[John Smith 19]

@jake

"to save the state of the system before going into protected mode. Ugly, ugly, ugly ... but very functional hack ... "

IIRC the issue was not going *into* protected mode, it was coming *back* to real. The former had 1 or more opcodes in the instruction set (no doubt with some complex data structures you had to set up) but not so for coming back. Either intel were "encouraged" to this view (because a machine as *powerful* as a 286 will only need real mode when booting *nix) or it never ocured to them it would be needed. Except to run legacy (MSDOS) applications, which turned out to be quite a big market for OS/2 running hardware.

Me, in the same timeframe for MS/IBM/Intel, I ran DOS 5.0, 4DOS, QEMM, and DesqView on a generic 8meg 386sx16 (with math-co; I still have it, and it still runs). It even ran Windows 3.0 in a "window" without problems ... Was faster "seat of the pants" than the 32Meg 3/260 Sun Workstation I used at work, and a hell of a lot more useful than the vaxen I left behind at DEC. My home connectivity box was either an AT&T 3B1, or a 386 running MWC's Coherent (The DOS 5.0 box connected thru' one of the UN*X machines). All of these overlapped in the mid-late '80s & very early '90s ... Was an interesting time :-)

4DOS I heard was quite good and had a following for turnkey systems supplied by small VARs. Isn't QEMM/Desq view the genesis of VMWare? At least the concept of virtual machines not dedicated to a specific OS (Although I suppose VM on an IBM 360 probably pre-dates them all). Was the 3B1 one of AT&T's proprietary processors? Hobbit? Coherent I remember as a small footprint (certainly by modern standards given the available memory and hard disk space) *nix clone.

[jake]

@John Smith 19

"IIRC the issue was not going *into* protected mode, it was coming *back* to real."

Which is why the state of the system needed to be saved before going into protected mode ... and saved in "out of bandwidth" memory & CPU. Make sense?

Not sure of the QEMM/Desqview & VMWare connection.

Yes, IBM predates all when it comes to VMMs.

3B1 was a Motorola 68010 with a custom chipset.

Coherent could have become what Linux became (I could say the same of Minix). Coherent was a tight, clean, clone of UNIX[tm], coded mostly in assembler. I used it for several years, until Mark Williams Company was obviously about to fold ... and then I switched to Slackware. I've been a slacker ever since :-)

[John Smith 19]

@Jake

My point was that Intel had not designed the 286 to come back from protected mode once in it.

The 68010 would put it in the high end Macintosh range

"and then I switched to Slackware. I've been a slacker ever since :-)"

You have been experiencing Penguin love for a long time.