I love the way that the developers at MicroSoft had to create crude versions of Unix utilities to make their application development less painful. Perhaps the old joke about "those that don't know Unix are doomed to recreate it poorly" are true!
@@NCommander Makes sense. I briefly programmed on VMS back in the late 1990s, and there was a lot ports of BSD Unix or GNU tools installed on the systems that I worked on. The core things like compilers, debuggers and profilers were very good and available from Digital themselves but like with the DOS world it seemed that a lot of the other tools built on what had gone before in the Unix world.
@@chriswareham Well, a lot comes from the source, and a lot in a Bubble IBM stuff seems to be built around Intel's devkit tools (there is a lot of "soft" similiarity). DIGITAL wrote most of their own compilers, but I think used cfront for C/C++ which made it behaviorly very similar to UNIX, and VMS was POSIX compatible, you could even use sh as an interactive shell if you like. Borland had their own implementations of Pascal, Basic and C, and they're still technically around. Watcom's big grace is they supported everyone in one single compiler package. Micorsoft had a long history of development tools going back to the 8-bit era and the ATLAR, and could be seen as the core of early MSFT.
I remember reading a post by someone at Microsoft (may have been Raymond Chen, may not have been) that Microsoft developers were using XENIX for at least some of their MS-DOS development in the early days, and, by the time MS-DOS 2.0 came out and added support for subdirectories, they were already regretting harmonizing with the utilities IBM provided for PC-DOS that used / as their option flag because it meant that they couldn't use it as the path separator.
The OS/2 DOS box was also dubbed the 'penalty box' since it could only run one, full screen DOS instance at a time. Thankfully by OS/2 2.0 this was vastly improved.
What's so depressing is Microsoft had versions of OS/2 1.0 that could multitask DOS applications on a 386, and Windows/286 also showed it could be done even on a 80286. Google OS/2 Football/Sizzle. They're on my topic list at some point.
Just stumbled on this through RU-vid recommendations, hell yeah do I want to see more! This is so well done and is chock full of interesting info - I had no idea that Microsoft actually had a JIT inside early versions of Word, that's awesome. Been a long time since I've so eagerly subbed to a tech channel! :)
It's more pure interpenetration as far as I can tell (that part of the code is shipped in object form) so Word actually runs slower on the whole because of it. While JITs were probably known at the time, I don't think they were proved practical until Java did it.
But.... why?? Was this just Microsoft hedging their bets, and going way beyond the call of duty to ensure portability between the various OSes that could become dominant at the time? Given that _just Microsoft_ was dabbling with DOS, Xenix, Windows, and OS/2 at the time, and there were Macintosh ports as well. It seems hard to fathom, in those early days, that the layer of abstraction wouldn't have caused a fair share of heartache. RAM, CPU, and storage space were all at a premium.
@@NCommander Yep, this actually finally explains why Word really felt so distinctively bloated and slow even in those golden times of efficient coding and almost nonexistent software bloat. Still, way less bloated though than modern unusably bloated Word, both absolutically and relatively to contemporary hardware.
I remember a third-party app called Word For Word. I think it was some kind of document-translation addon for Microsoft Word. This was in the DOS days. Then when Microsoft brought out Word For Windows, naturally there was a new version of the addon, called ... wait for it ... Word For Word For Word For Windows! #IKidYouNot
@@NCommander Waiting for the limited edition Xbox Series X Triple-X Edition. Everybody knows X is the coolest letter in the alphabet, by far. Suck it, Z. Like my dad used to say, the more Xes the better.
RU-vid needs more videos in 16 color. Whenever I'm doing a new GNU/Linux (usually a Debian) install, I always go for the old school text installer because it is so fun to interact with.
Thank you kindly. I do plan to do more of these videos, but I'm a little hesistant because their licenses aren't exactly what I call fun. Still, I'm deeply eyeing the Adobe Photoshop, or maybe some stuff on the Rogue Archive webpage.
You have quickly become one of my favorite channels on RU-vid. I work as a software engineer and you don't understand how much joy it brings me to stop compiling shit, stop the painful dev workflows, call it a day, and go watch someone else do it on RU-vid 😂
My favorite document editor from 1989 was "Framemaker", with which I created and edited tons of software documentation for medical device development. It had a built-in version of "Maple", a mathematical environment akin to Wolfram Alpha, used for equation editing and expression "simplification" (i.e. solving). In addition, it did an excellent job supporting structured documents (i.e. paragraphs tagged with styles, just like Word, but better implemented than any Word version I've seen then or since. Framemaker, alas, is long gone.
@@kelli217 you announce a preference for correct pronunciation, I question priority of that issue, you question the priority of my question... It's a vacuous cycle
To be honest, the voiced S is how I always remember hearing and pronouncing it. I get so many comments complaing I use a Z sound but it doesn't sound right to me.
@@CordSchneider initialisms don't inherently take on the pronunciation of their origin words. You don't say "skuh-buh" for SCUBA or "lahhseer" for laser, right?
I'm glad youtube recommended me this channel. Also it almost feels weird seing someone use the Cinnamon DE in a video, for some reason it doesn't seem to be very popular compared to Gnome or KDE.
Usability is overrated in 2021 it seems :(. Cinnamon manages to basically do what a DE needs to do, and then stay out of the way without being super fancy.
You made a list of why OS/2 failed. It was much much simpler than that. Development tools were net readily available… meaning you couldn’t just pirate them from a BBS. So, no one developed for it.
Short answer about running on Windows 10 : Should if is Windows 10 32 bit version There is a video where a guy does Windows upgrades from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10 32 bit and can keep running original Windows 1.0 applications on every version of Windows. However, the 64 bit version of Windows, dropped all support to run 16 bit applications.
Damn, I really miss actually useful error messages. Heck. it even suggests what you should do to fix it (11:27). It's not a like "Uh-oh, something went wrong" or a BSoD with emoji
I wish Microsoft didn't force everyone to use Microsoft 365 subscription-only crapware nowadays. I think it's so greedy of them to only sell their suite as a subscription only product now. I didn't mind paying every several years for a permanent version.
365 is subscription. They've always offered a non subscription version: 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. Currently, 365=2019. Home and business 2019 is $249, or just over 3x years of subscription 365 (but you lose Publisher and Access; Pro is $399 and has those, but it's nearly 6 years of subscription in price.)
He might be thinking of Adobe which indeed does the subscription only model. Microsoft just prices Office so high that you'd have to a small fortune but considering there hasn't been any real "major" features in Office from 97 -> onward, well ...
@@cokeacolasucks I'm still using Office 2013 but I've switched to LibreOffice recently since it does almost everything I want an Excel and Word to do. The only thing I'd say the Microsoft products do better is having much nicer templates available to download.
I think one of the other technical/marketing problems with OS/2 was what incentive was there to create a native OS/2 application? With OS/2 having a Windows personality, you could run Windows 3.x programs flawlessly. So if you were a developer, why limit your market to only OS/2 users (or develop two versions) of your application when a 3.x release would work on both. Without any "killer apps" you couldn't get on Windows, why would you use OS/2?
I'm new to the channel and I've been binging your videos (found you via the pinball video, as an MJD subscriber I had to watch :D) However, I can't find the second part of this video (you mention in the end) on your channel. Did you ever manage to get it out? I'd love to see it!
Every company should do like Microsoft did and release the source code after 20 years, for archival, before its completely lost. We lost so many pieces of historical software already, its kind of sad.
In my relatively limited experience, grep, fgrep, and egrep often all use the same binaries and sets the switches based on which one you ran. Or egrep and fgrep are scripts that call grep with specific switches. You MIGHT have had everything you needed, already if either of these two cases were true. Or you could have edited the script to have grep called instead but add the -E flag for egrep.
Fascinating story, and I would love to see a follow-up to this one. Any hopeful chance that we might see a part 2? Thanks for the great retro history work! 🙂
The answer is "eventually", but TBH, this project had a lot of behind the scenes problems (this video took nearly a month to put together) that I don't want to go into, and I've kinda shelved it for the time being.
So I have a clear recallection reading about the maligned word 6 for macos, and how it was supposed to have been written in some kinda script language from the windows version. But it's much better explained by the bytecode runtime
I actually made a slight factual error (it's noted in the writeup); Word itself is compiled to bytecode, but EL is actually the runtime for the macro language. I meant to address this in part 2 of Word, but TBH, that video has had difficulty in the scriptwriting stages so its deferred until I can manage to tackle it.
So, P-code (pseudo-code) is EL meta data structures like nowadays lambda JIT code to compile inline to actual code or just a data structure for IntelliSense or class inheritance. Note, OS/2 REXX script language with VROjects add-on is still way better than nowadays Powershell. Why in programming to OS/2 you need anchor (application/process instance) and window handle , but in Windows only a window handle? Is it for console extension to GUI paradigm? More, in Windows your 0,0 location is top and left versus OS/2 bottom and left to enforce XGA graphics card usage versus VGA clones. Windows and OS/2 have opposite z-directions to make porting tedious using view port and world mapping efficiently if try to be dual software rendering compliant.
5:00 Presentation Manager is this way because of the infighting between IBM divisions and Microsoft. (Before anyone comments, I'm not a know all person and my sourse is a video by the youtube channel "Another Boring Topic", so please don't act like I'm a person who just argues and doesn't understand opinions or sarcasm/jokes as I'm not).
Ummm..."kludged" is pronounced, 'CLUE-jd', ie. the U vowel sound is long. Found myself doing a double-take there, thinking, WTF did he just say..?! ;-) Oh also, "DOS" isn't pronounced as though it ends with a 'Z'...
Just to let you. I was one of the first working with os/2 since 1.0. 1.2 had an official version of word and excel for OS/2 as well as page maker. On thing you had to know there was a Rex application with iOS/2. Banks used the OS/2 because of stability. .
I still have my copy of OS\2 warp which contains a much more stable windows 3.2. I believe that OS\2 Warp failed because Windows 95 was not available because the IBM and MS partnership had failed. It made OS\2 useless for the end user for upgrades which is a shame.
These questions have a very distinct answer: 1. why compile Word for ... [what] ... ? 2. why should I use OS/2? The answer is: *Because I can!* _(And it is also a moral obligation to geekhood)_
Not about OS/2 but I was playing with 86Box last night, and found that when installing Windows 95, you can opt to load up the old style 3.11 File Manager instead of the Windows 95 desktop..
Did you just say Xenix was by Microsoft? I've heard the name Xenix before but know nothing about it. Perhaps you could make a video about Xenix at some point?
@@NCommander I guarantee nobody at MSFT would care. Someone at MSFT asked legal to draft a license so they could donate the source code. That doesn't mean anyone at MSFT legal is watching RU-vid to enforce the license in its strictest possible terms. They have way better things to do.
This was really fascinating to watch and you did a great job filling in the gaps for those like me that are no very familiar with OS/2. Subscribed immediately and looking forward to your other videos!
It probably was, but it was quite awhile before there was enough get up and go on an actual Macintosh to do development. I won't be surprised if Apple kept using Workshop until the Macintosh Plus or even later because early Macs were really anemic.
@@NCommander But the Lisa’s 68000 CPU ran several MHz slower than the one in the Mac. Equipped with the same amount of RAM and a hard disk, the Mac was almost certainly a much faster build environment than the Lisa.
As someone who often has to build old C projects I really enjoyed this journey... was on the edge of my seat with every little setback :) I like how you go through failed attempts; makes people like me feel a bit less stupid when I keep running into roadblocks with each step of something I'm trying to figure out. Would love to see some snippets of anything you find interesting just to see what the general style was back then. And I'm guessing Windows 10 is able to run this, assuming you're using a 32 bit version. Microsoft loves them some backward compatibility.
It actually fails miserably on Windows 10, and almost all later versions of XP. The reasons are rather complex, but I haven't gotten back to this just yet.
To be fair, most Xsun users would expect regular crashes to command line, so I'm not exactly sure I can call that boring. After all, you haven't lived until emacs dumps core!
For what it's worth, the 32 and 64 bit PE (Portable Executable) executables in modern Windows still have the MS-DOS stub in the first hundred bytes, which will print "This program cannot be run in DOS mode", if started under DOS. You can link a PE file using any DOS program as a stub.
Indeed correct; the MZ binary at the start infact part of the PE specification. Even grubx64.efi on my system has "This program can't be started in DOS mode".
Now this brings back memories. My first PC was an IBM PS/2 sx56 386sx running OS/2 2.0, I bought it from my pocket money at a garage sale and it just so happened to come with that (it was ancient at that time I got it already). I've found a set of floppies through friends (and parents of friends) that contained a native OS/2 set of Word 5 and Excel 4 I think. I actually still have that old 386 and it's in working order too, I boot it up from time to time just for fun.
