Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000) (opens in new tab)

I was a dev on the Visual C++ team at this time (1990s). Part of making largish compiler changes would involve throwing a test compiler at all of WinNT and seeing what broke in the build process. It was challenging to do so, to say the least. Just getting the whole mess set up was a struggle for me.

Of course, things got better as time went on thanks to process improvement. I started in 1991, and I remember driving over to the NT team's building with a large (for the time) hard drive to grab a physical copy of the source tree. This was before NT was first released - when you tried running your build and went to shut it down, you had to watch the activity LED on the drive flash a few times to be sure the cache had synced to disk and powering down was safe. Fast forward a few years, and building all of WinNT was more routine, to the point it was just another component built by the automated VC++ checkin procedure (we called it submitting code to The Gauntlet), along with Excel and other Office components.

I might be misremembering if NT was part of Gauntlet, but it was definitely something we could and would build as desired.

Certainly building everything from scratch is time consuming, but why should it be difficult? Windows 2000 was developed before I became a programmer, but not too many years later (2003) I was a teenager running Gentoo, and while it was time consuming to build everything from scratch, it was easy and reliable. It was also quite easy to switch out or hack on individual parts. In particular I remember fiddling endlessly with the kernel.

Windows 2000 was certainly complex, but was it really substantially more complex than a full Linux distribution (including compilers, desktop environment, office suite, etc)? Why was it so difficult to build from scratch?

NT 3.x, 4.0 and 5.0 (2000) which the presentation are about were, at least, quite free from commercial junk. It was only when consumer and professional Windows merged into one with XP that the enshittification started -- but that being said, it's bad on an entirely different level now. It's easy to look back longingly at the days of XP and 7 now that Windows is so overwhelmingly user hostile.

Like, rhetorical dude from 2002, you're mad that Windows XP will not let you remove Internet Explorer easily and that it requires online or phone activation to work? Let me tell you about Windows 11...

> Remember MSN and baking IE into the OS

Yeat another thing where Microsoft was ahead of the curve, nowadays we get Electron (aka Chrome) all over the place.

People even buy laptops where the browser turned into the OS!

> Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...

Apologies. This was me. Pretty much all 10. Most of them were just white-labels of the same code. Believe me, I hated doing it. MS didn't want to do the right thing and vertically-integrate everything like Apple was doing, which was the better solution as then you owned the entire user experience from end-to-end.

We know how that story ended.

Well they got slapped for including IE forcible by the EU and there was never an App Store like that over XPs lifetime to my knowledge? Also you could quite easily replace the whole Shell. Sadly not anymore if you do that now stuff you need access to will just stop working because everything "metro" will need the explorer shell actively running in the background.

> Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

I`m really curious, which version of Windows you mean?

Because I don't remember this on win 3.11, win XP, win 95, etc. etc. Of course there sometimes HW/drivers issue, sometime some programs corrupt system files, etc. etc. But crashing every so often.. thats strange.

> I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days.

Not to mention being as easy to attack as a house made of butter.

Was Windows NT ever that unstable? I know 95, 98, and ME were all notorious for stability issues, but was under the impression that NT was better.

> Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

That sounds like a Windows 3.1, where applications could easily take down the operating system. Windows 9x wasn't quite as bad. If I recall correctly, properly written applications could not take down the operating system though drivers certainly could. That said, there were certainly ways for developers to break the rules since there was little (if any enforcement) so some applications did take down the operating system. With the Windows NT series, there was sufficient isolation and enforcement of that isolation, that it was very reliable. Drivers could be an issue, as with bugs in Microsoft's code, but that was nothing in comparison to contemporary versions of 3.1 and 9x.

On the whole, I don't think it is reasonable to blame Microsoft for the reliability of their operating system. There were certainly design issues that resulted in it being unreliable, especially when running third-party code. On the other hand, the operating system was basically an evolution of a product line that started on the 8088 with very limited memory (I'm speaking of PC-DOS here) and a great degree of compatibility had to be maintained. Keep in mind, the computer industry did not work at the same pace: features had to wait until processors incorporated them, processor adoption had to wait for manufacturers to build them into their systems, and then consumers buy those systems in sufficient numbers. For example: the 286 was introduced in early 1982, but the IBM PC AT did not come out for another 2.5 years. Microsoft was also limited by the hardware their customers owned, even when it supported particular features. Life is much harder when you cannot throw memory at the problem because people had 2 or 4 or 8 MB of RAM.

On the other hand, Windows NT was a completely different product. There was much less concern over compatibility. There was much more intent to throw away baggage to create a modern (for the time) operating system. It did not crash every two hours.

I'm honestly not sure if that was windows's fault. In that time period we also had:

1. budget devices from OEMs that cut corners at every cost

2. capacitor plague with merchants unable to guarantee good capacitors from any source

> Apple is making its desktop OS more "secure" (read: convoluted and does less stuff) every release.

Do you have some examples of how macOS is doing less / capable of less today, than say 1 or 2 or 3 releases ago?

Adding ads is clearly doing "More Stuff" yet becoming "Less Useful". That is the most obvious counter example imo.

Another would be fragmenting the settings between the control panel and the new settings menu. It does more stuff (you have twice as many settings apps!) but it is less useful, because you are less likely to find the setting you are liking for.

Another example of doing more and becoming less useful is requiring a TPM for Windows 11. My security should be my decision. Not letting one install Windows obviously makes Windows less useful than if it could be installed.

In general (ie, not a Windows specific issue) ever growing hardware requirements makes the software less useful over time, as it can only run on a smaller and smaller subset of hardware. As software gets better, it should run on more hardware than it did before. Not less. Windows will simply not run on hardware from 15-20 years ago that is otherwise fully functional. That means it is less useful than it was before.

> is that a product becomes Less Useful over time > it does More Stuff every release

I wouldn't say "doing more" is better. I'd be happy if it did a lot less. I don't care about most of the big new features in windows. I'd be a lot more happy they'd rework their old antiquated stuff that keeps making problems (drivers, registry, focus handling, etc. etc.).

> Apple is making its desktop OS more "secure" (read: convoluted and does less stuff)

What is apple really making less useful with time? For me I really like many of the new features. The only reason I stick to windows is that gamging is still horrible on macOS.

That's a really interesting take. Thanks!

For example, Windows kernel's write watch feature is useful for writing a GC. Linux lacked (and as far as I know, still lacks) this feature, so Microsoft had to rewrite .NET runtime.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/working-through-things...

A lot of the original designs of Windows were elegant in theory but never simplified and unified. COM objects are a good example, they were just a pain to deal with from languages at the time (and arguably still are).

I switched from 98 to ME for a week before 2k, and it (2k) was rock solid for years.

> But I miss the ability to only pull down a portion of a monorepo, and the ability to remap where folders are at, or to pull down a single folder into multiple locations.

We have all that with git in Microsoft though. We don't check out the entire office monorepo - only the parts relevant to what you're working on (Excel in my case).

Also sharing stuff in SourceDepot wasn't the bad part (you get links to changelists and those open in a desktop program). The bad part was the branching model, commits, no real/good CI (we had a commit queue) etc). SourceDepot was just overall a bad scm for us.

Ehhh can’t say I’m a fan of folder remapping. It gets a little too auto-magical and since all tools access the file system directly different users can see different things. That’s just begging for bugs and “works on my machine”.

I’m moderately confident the correct path is monorepo + centralization + virtual filesystem. Not every tool plays nice with VFS but at this point most do.

The D in DVCS is almost entirely a waste. Source control systems should, imho, trivially support petabytes of history and terabyte scale clones.

Perforce's support for that is not great these days. They don't support it in streams, and honestly if you're not using streams in p4 these days you're doing it wrong.

If you have a moment, a tangential question. A little while ago I read a very interesting comment responding to some general "why is this and that broken [in Windows]", that said

> Windows is only $5m a year

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934946

I was very impressed to determine that was only $416k/mo. Since I read that I've been like "that can't be right." (There's certainly no qualification of scope to work with.) That's roughly 15-20 (~$250k-$333k) senior developer salaries.

I'm very curious how and where Windows practically fits into the pie chart nowadays, mostly just from the perspective of a passively curious person who likes to file away watermarks and yardsticks :)

There's probably some perfectly externally-facing info out there under a rock I'm not sure where to look for...

> I'm not sure I'm privvy to all information but looking at the org chart this part is false. The ads org is much much smaller than E+D.

Look at Panos' org and compare to the WebXT org (both under E+D).

> Shows that people 30 years ago were having precisely the same problems on big software projects we have today.

An interesting question is: why are we still having the same problems today? why haven't they been solved yet?

SD was basically P4 with syntactic sugar. You likely didn't have permissions to create branches.

Windows sources 20 years ago used to have a ridiculously complicated branching strategy, driven by middle managers and made worse by having actual devs sneak around the edges to do "buddy builds" of changes with some godawful batch file that I heard may have originated with RaymondC (who was exactly the kind of person to make ridiculous MSFT somehow bearable for the rest of us). It was Conway's Law, somehow twisted and applied to version control. With permissions SNAFUs.

I still see companies today trying to map their org chart into their branching strategy and just shake my head . . . and run away.