Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

See below...
On Wed, 23 May 2007 12:07:13 +0100, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article news:<0is553l8q76s5pj2a1foljgs9tmo2m1167@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M.
Newcomer wrote:
But [Win95] was still crap. Because ...

Well, I wouldn't have put it quite so strongly ... but from a technical
standpoint I do agree, yes.

Amazingly clever crap, but crap.

However, from a marketing POV it was brilliant. NT had a (completely
erroneous) reputation for being "difficult" and would have been very difficult
to sell to home users. It was '95 that weaned most people off Win16 and onto
Win32, while still supporting old DOS apps like games. Without it MS would
have lost quite a lot of ground to OS/2.
****
I doubt that completely. OS/2 was being marketed by IBM, which has to rank as The Most
Clueless Personal Computer Company In The Known Universe.

The IBM PC was a bootleg project of a small team within IBM. When the creator of the IBM
PC was killed in an airline crash, IBM had no one with the vision to market the PC. In
fact, the corporation was actively hostile to the concept of marketing the PC. Besides,
it didn't support the only important character set in the universe, EBCDIC. It used that
horrible ANSI character set, that wasn't an IBM invention.

A scenario described to me by an ex-IBM employee: he was walking out of a major
corporation while the workstation salesman was walking in. Thee days later, he gets
orders from his boss that he is "not to poach" the workstation sales, and he should not go
back to that company again, since it was the domain of the workstation division. Of
course, what happened was that when IBM wouldn't return their phone calls, the company
bought from Compaq.

[This led to a friend of mine saying "Remember, if you don't cannibalize one of your
division's revenue streams, your competitors will be happy to do it for you"]

Another ex-IBM employee told me that IBM was so commited to the 286 chip that when Compaq
announced their 386 box, there was not a single 386 chip anywhere in the IBM corporation,
including their research division (it turns out it was something is job required him to
know).

IBM wasted years trying to build a version of OS/2 that would support the 286, and this
gave Microsoft the time to create Windows (in fact, the reason MS abandoned OS/2 was that
Gates wanted to simply dump OS/2 and build Windows in partnership with IBM, but IBM would
not hear of any strategy that would not provide support for the 286, even though by that
time the chip was already obsolete).

A retired IBMer said it was very sad when he went to local stores and saw signs saying
"IBM PCs" for sale, but not a single one was manufactured by IBM.

IBM created the affordable personal computer, then essentially abandoned the market to
their competitors.

My own story: I was traveling with my "portable" machine (a full-sized tower in those
days). I was doing a ride-share with someone who asked me who made my computer. I said
"I did." I explained that I bought a motherboard from one vendor, a disk drive from
another, a controller card from a third, and so on, and built the machine myself. "You
should buy American" he said. "Oh, you mean like IBM?" I asked. "Yes, a good American
computer". "Oh my," I replied, "why do you think the IBM PC Is an American product?" He
replied "Because it's made in America!"

I explained that if he had ever looked inside one, he;d see that most of the chips were
manufactured in Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, or Taiwan. The monochrome monitor was a
rebranded Tatung monitor (a Korean company). I've forgotten where the disk drive was
manufactured, but it was manufactured offshore, although it was an IBM brand, they had no
domestic disk drive manufacturing line at that time. In fact, the only part of the
computer manufctured in the USA was the metal case, which was manufactured by a small
company in Tennessee. I'd once owned an IBM PC, but I wasn't allowed to call for tech
support. Instead, I had to go through a sales drone, who garbled my question, and after
two days delivered an answer unrelated to anything I'd asked. With this computer, I had
direct lines to tech support, it cost 1/4 of the cost of the IBM PC (I hadn't paid full
price because I was at the University when I bought it and got a 50% discount), had a
bigger disk than anything IBM offered, had a faster processor than anything IBM offered,
and it worked just fine, thank you.
*****

I used it on laptops because NT-capable laptops were very expensive in
those days ...

I have one laptop from "those days": a Toshiba Tecra 750. That's a 233MHz MMX
Pentium with 64MB or RAM (OK, so not exactly bottom-of-the-range) and that ran
much better under NT4 than it did under the supplied Win95. I've even run XP
on it, though the low memory size makes that a struggle.
****
I tried to install NT on my laptop, but it wouldn't install. The laptop wasn't certified.
*****

... the failure of hardware vendors to produce NT drivers ...

I certainly came across that.

I have an early Panasonic/Matsushita DVD-RAM drive in one of my desktop
machines. It's a dual-CPU Pentium III machine, and Panasonic had a lot of
trouble getting their drivers to work with the 2-CPU architecture. NT4 was OK
by the time I got the driver but the Win2k driver didn't work with 2 CPUs
until about 2 years after Win2k was released. That's unpardonable.
****
Most drivers didn't work on multiprocessors; they'd never been tested, and the
programmers had no concept of concurrency. I've had to fix some of those drivers; they
were really quite horrible.
*****

It's not always a technical issue, though: My wife had a Canon
printer/scanner/fax thing that she used quite happily for a while with Win95.
When she changed job she found that she had to upgrade to Win2k to make best
use of the office network, and then found that Canon didn't provide a driver
for her printer that ran under Win2k. Canon's excuse was that she had a "home"
printer and they didn't support it under Win2k because that was an "Office"
OS. So, Canon's printer went into the bin and was replaced with an HP, thereby
denying Canon any profit from the several hundred pounds she has spent on
inkjet cartridges since. Interestingly, under linux the same drivers (not
supplied by Canon) drive many of the "home" and "office" versions of the Canon
printers, so the distinction must have been just a restrictive trading
practice on Canon's part to prevent businesses buying cheap "Home" printers.
*****
I once went to Comdex, where from the CPU group I got a big (4") button that said "HP
Supports NT" printed in a circle around an HP logo. I then wandered over to the
printer/scanner part of the HP display, and each time I asked "does it have NT drivers?" I
was told "No." So I'd look at this large button I was wearing, look at the salescritter,
take the badge off and hold it up against the HP logo on the printer or scanner and make a
show of comparing the two logos, and so on, and ask questions like "Is this the same HP
that is handing out these buttons?" or "Oh, so HP has a corporate policy of lying?" or
"Oh, so this is a counterfeit HP product?" When they explained it was authentic, I would
say, "But it can't be real, or it would support NT. See here where it says that HP
supports NT..."

It was a really fun Comdex.
*****

... and the failure of software vendors to write code that would run on
NT.

I've not found that to be a major problem. I did come across a version of
Quicken that wouldn't run on NT, so I used Excel instead ...

I also used it for testing to make sure that code I developed could run on
a brain-dead 16-bit operating system (don't fool yourself: it was a 16-bit
OS with a 32-bit barnacle grafted to it, badly) because some customers ran
it.

We all had that problem. I also had to run '9x because I had to write and
maintain a VxD that provided the protected-mode side of a transparent disk
encryption package.
****
And the Linux people think that we should be able to write code for thirty different
flavors of operating systems, and support it on systems that have been locally modified by
who-knows-whom to do who-knows-what?
*****

Don't be too hard on the Barnacle -- it's a damned clever piece of coding,
despite all its imperfections -- and don't fool yourself that DOS was an OS!
****
DOS was a file management subroutine library.
****

Cheers,
Daniel.





Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.