Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT Remember when the Windows Start Menu was a pure thing, unsullied by ads and decades of tinkering? Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has shared his role in bringing an iconic piece of Windows 95 into the world of Windows NT. While some might consider that Microsoft lost its way when it ditched Program Manager for the …
I used Netbeui to create DHCP for DECnet under DOS - unheard of at the time. I loaded the Netbeui stack, connected to a local server (VMS machine running PATHWorks), got a DECnet address, unloaded the NetBeui stack and loaded DECnet. It worked great. Coopers & Lybrand, in London used it.
Shame that everyone moved to TCP/IP soon afterwards.
Alan
Definitely, I was working to try and get clinical users working well in the computing environment in the early days, most of them working with DEC PDP-11 computers via a terminal and no menus at all. Once the Windows Start Menu appeared everyone was able to move to the Windows computing world quickly and easily ... so many early clinical users were able to start creating their data analysis software in the Windows environment via the menu access, not having to look for a program on the hard disk directory.
The early Windows world made everything easy for people who had major interests outside the computing world but were suddenly able to start using it. Windows was originally designed well to be easy for everyone to use, A world that has died now.
The original Start Menu was a masterpiece in organisational simplicity. I could put all my office apps in an Office submenu, all my Programming stuff in a Programming submenu, etc. etc. Observing users using "dump everything all in one place" as their default usage paradigm, Microsoft built that into the Start Menu so it's just a long long long alphabetical list of *EVERYTHING*.
The original Start Menu was a masterpiece in organisational simplicity.
Really? As I recall the Start menu was a mess of a unnecessary tree of sub-sub-sub menus for anything you could want to get to. e.g.:
Start -> Program Files -> Adobe Software -> Acrobat Reader for Windows Free:
And never minding the horrible ergonomics of Start on the bottom, Program files on the top, and how time consuming it was to navigate that tree of folders every time you wanted to access some frequently used program...
Even then, you still had a cluttered mess of garbage shortcuts to pick through with nothing making the main one you want stand out at all... Something like:
* Visit Adobe.com
* Buy Adobe Software Suite
* Uninstall / Reinstall
* Acrobat
* Online Help
* Plugins marketplace
* Extra Tools
Windows is one of those strange examples which demonstrates that sometimes UI can be designed better by engineers rather than usability "experts".
The NT / 2000 era was also the last in a time when UI was exciting and companies actually wanted to explore desktop processes. Quite sad this ended.
Have you any evidence that the later Start Menus were designed by experts to be usable? It seems more likely that they were designed to drive adoption of Microsoft services such as One Drive and Bing.
What I'm urging is caution against judging a whole professional field based upon something from Microsoft.
Microsoft is in such as state of chaos that I am not entirely sure that it was designed or implemented by "engineers" either to be quite honest.
I give Gnome 3 a hard time for being unusable but the fact that Microsoft already had something good and has regressed to such an extent is truely sad.
At least Gnome 3 had to regress due to mounting licensing pressures.
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html
(Full circle back to the one of the other Reg authors website ;)
[commenting on the linked post]
Qt was licenced under GPL many years before Unity and GNOME 3 were an idea in anyone's mind.
Qt was LGPL before either Gnome 3 or Unity started development.
The rest of that post is just nonsense and an attempt to fabricate historical events that never happened.
The article is a little heavy on the fawning over a Windows developer... Graphics contexts in Windows have been able to scale/stretch/rotate since the early 90s. Using a thread to detach the GUI from the network connection likewise was not a novel technique with Windows NT.
On the plus side, it makes my software contributions to the world sound less minimal. Also, the Start Menu was pretty nice in those days.
Sit on the naughty step and never move.
Some of the girls at work have this nonsense on the stock control system. Out of nowhere a random, loud, video advert will pop up the front and play for thirty seconds and then go away. They seem to think this is normal, just a modern annoyance. If that happened on a machine that I bought, it would go back in its box and back to the vendor as being defective. Trust me, an autistic person deep in a coding session does not need those sorts of distractions. And if the vendor was unhelpful, I'd be rather tempted to seek satisfaction with the pointy end of my favourite pickaxe (yes, I have more than one, modern life is shit).
I very much share your sentiments. Up until the pickaxe at least. The inclusion of advertising another distracting crap in the start menu has always struck me as completely inappropriate for a business product. I have to switch a lot of these things off because they affect my focus when I’m working. The same goes for the default home page in most web browsers, disappointingly I have to include Firefox in this.
When I am supporting other people I notice they are affected in different ways by this type of thing. Many, as you say, just accept it as an everyday annoyance and work around it. There are some whose work can be significantly impeded when presented with something they don’t know how to respond to. In my experience, with the most excruciating irony, it’s all the tips and tricks and welcome messages that cause the most hassle. They don’t help people to use the product. They just get in the way.
Re: While some might consider that Microsoft lost its way when it ditched Program Manager for the Windows 95 Start Menu, that early iteration represented a far more innocent world compared to what pops up when the Windows key is pressed in Windows 11.
Do you mean Classic Shell?
I had a friend who worked at MS at the time and he sent me a NT 3.51 Server CD back then and that was my main OS until NT 4 came out(was tired of Win9x stability issues). I do recall on MS's ftp site they had a explorer shell preview for NT 3, though was always too worried about stability to install it. I was fond of NT4 for a while as well but eventually got tired of stability issues(and seemed like I had to re-install Windows about every 6 months to resolve stability issues) there and that was my real shift to Linux as my daily driver sometime in 1997, and Linux ever since. Windows certainly has far better stability now vs back then.
Though the workflow I adopted in the late 90s with 16 virtual desktops(on a single monitor) and edge flipping(first with AfterStep(at one point I had probably 60 virtual desktops with that), and past 15 years with Gnome and brightside) isn't compatible with how Windows(or Mac) works (I do use Windows on a regular basis inside of VMware workstation which runs on a dedicated virtual desktop).
One thing I distinctly remember from the early days of the Start menu was that there didn't seem to be much (or any?) caching, so that every time you invoked the start menu and navigated your way through the program menus, sub-menus would pause while waiting for the hard disk to chug as it looked for programs and their icons in each directory.
I'm sure that in a modern VM it would all be faster than the blink of an eye, but back then even with a whole 96MB of RAM, there was a lot of waiting for the hard disk to catch up
Windows 98 on VMWare on my Intel MacBook is a lot faster than on period appropriate hardware, but still a lot slower than Windows 10 in VMWare on the same computer, mainly because it only supports 1 CPU thread.
Caching isn’t a problem though probably because MacOS can easily cache the entire VMWare image in RAM.
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