You see all the wacky software that doesn't follow the rules properly, does whatever it wants, breaks things. And you have to figure out how Windows can accommodate all that software, keep it from breaking, and also prevent it from messing up a computer or undo the damage.
They did not have the option of saying "this app developer wrote shitty software, sucks to be them, not my problem."
I wonder how much of this problem was caused by lack of adequate documentation describing how an installer should behave, and how much was developers not reading that documentation and being content when it works on their machine.
There is a third option: the developers knew the rules and chose to ignore them for some reason. A modern example of this is the Zig language’s decision to reverse engineer and use undocumented APIs in Windows in preference of using documented APIs.
> In addition to what @The-King-of-Toasters said, the worst case scenario is really mild: A new version of windows comes out, breaking ntdll compatibility. Zig project adds a fix to the std lib. Application developer recompiles their zig project from source, and ships an update to their users.
Uh so what if the application developer isn't around any more?
The fact that they consider the worst case to be one where the application is still actively supported and the developer is willing to put up with this nonsense is pretty surprising. Not sure how anyone could believe that.
The reasons are clearly stated in the issue you have linked.
https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/commit/6193470ceea89a98...
All this to save a little memory CPU and memory usage? The juice does not seem worth the squeeze.
If we needed an example of why we should avoid using passive voice, this is it.
I understood not using the C Runtime and instead creating direct wrappers over the Win32 API, but going a level lower to APIs that are not guaranteed to be stable is nutty.
Reasonable people can disagree on a lot of things in programming. But I still do not understand how one can consider writing to memory the OS owns to be ok. It's sheer professional malpractice to do that kind of thing. With stuff like that, I don't think that any amount of documentation would have helped. The issue was that those programmers simply did not care about anything except getting their own program working, and did whatever the most expedient method was to get there.
Go to Vogons and look at all of the memory tricks people will use to get various games running on MS-DOS. This kind of juggling exactly which drivers to load, etc. is why Microsoft added the boot menu in MS-DOS 6.0 to CONFIG.SYS.
I'm not necessarily saying that this was the case here, but it smells like that to me.
For example, on the C64, you would get away with using the memory locations $02, $2A, $52, $FB to $FE, $02A7 to $02FF, and $0313 as scratch space for your own programs. Memory was incredibly scarce. I can’t blame programmers for sticking with their habits and for taking several years to unlearn and adjust their misconceptions about who owns what if they came from a home computer era where that pattern used to be the only way to get stuff done.
Things were different back then. People did a lot of hacky stuff to fit their programs into memory, because you were genuinely constrained by hardware limitations.
Not to mention, the idea of the OS owning the machine was not as well developed as it is today. Windows 3.11 was just another program, it didn't have special permissions like modern OSes, and you would routinely bypass it to talk to the hardware directly.
I agree--back then when computers had <=4MB or RAM I would've called hogging unused memory for some selfish speculative future use "professional malpractice".
Are you going to tell them what "32-bit Clean" meant for Mac developers, or will we let them find out that particular horror movie for themselves?
Your manager tells you to reduce memory usage of the program "or else".
I've been there and done it, and I offer no apologies. The platform preferred and the requirements demanded by The Powers That Be were not my fault.
There were no rules in DOS, or r_x permissions like Unix.
The DOS kernel itself didn't really impose any structure on the filesystem. All that mattered was:
- The two files that comprised DOS itself (MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS) had to be "inode" 0 and 1 on the disk in early versions,
- the kernel parsed \CONFIG.SYS on boot, and I think looked for \COMMAND.COM if you didn't specify a different shell with COMSPEC= in CONFIG.SYS. There were defaults if \CONFIG.SYS didn't exist, but of course all your DEVICE= stuff won't load and you'll probably not have a working mouse, CD-ROM, etc.
\AUTOEXEC.BAT was optional. That's it. Any other files could be anywhere else. I think the MS-DOS installer disk put files in C:\DOS by convention but that was just a convention. As long as COMMAND.COM was findable DOS would boot and be useable-and if you mucked something up you just grab your DOS boot floppy with A:\COMMAND.COM on it and fix it.
From what I recall most installers-if provided-made a directory in \ and put all their files there, mixing executables with read-write data. There was no central registry of programs or anything unless you were using a third party front-end.
Windows 3.x and 95 inherited the DOS legacy there.
That assume that you where going to install the OS, which assumes that you had an hard drive :-). The original IBM PC didn't, and anyway MS-DOS didn't support folders until version 2.0.
On those old PCs you would boot your computer on a floppy drive with all the files on the root of a floppy, and execute your command there. There was not much to work with anyway, check the content of the boot floppy of MSDOS 1.0 [1].
And also, especially if you had a single floppy, you wouldn't even use it: to run your software you would boot a disk with a IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM and an AUTOEXEC.BAT that would start your favorite word processor (WordStar of course :-D ).
Yes. For whatever reason my father used C:\SYS and I inherited it, along with C:\WIN for Windows.
It was mostly the latter. And when Windows broke, people would blame it on Microsoft, not on the software they installed. The same if the software broke. And you didn’t have online updates at the time that could retroactively add fixes. So Microsoft had to do everything they could to ensure broken software would still work, while also keeping Windows working, the best they could.
I think they chose to do everything they could to keep it limping along. An alternative would've been a name-and-shame approach, like "This program crashed because the author made this mistake: [short description or code or whatever]", and leave them out to try until the devs stopped doing those dumb things. After a few years of pain, people would've gotten with the program, so to speak. Instead, they chose the path that put zero pressure on devs to write correctly-behaving software.
This was even more important at a time when Microsoft had actual competition in the OS space and people weren't able to just go online and download updates.
And what does the customer do if the vendor has discontinued it? Or charges for an upgrade? Or has gone out of business?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41...
I'm pretty sure another one was "what if you're wrong/have a false positive detection, and slander another company, one with lawyers?"
Not necessarily. This was still very much the time in which choosing to stick with an old version which worked (e.g. Windows 3.1) wasn't uncommon.
Just look at how many people jumped from XP to 7 due to the network effect of "Vista sucks" and then multiply that by the fact that, at the time of 3.1->95, people had far fewer computer security concerns, if any.
If your business runs on some obscure piece of software for which updates are neither cheap or easy, you're not going to buy Windows if it doesn't run that software.
Name and shame doesn't work because the developer isn't part of the transaction.
Yes, the real, can't say no world of system software is not what one might wish.
Consider:
Windows 95 ran the vast majority of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 applications with minimal performance loss, supported MS-DOS and Windows 3.x drivers for hardware that lacked 32-bit driver support, and ran acceptably on a 386 with as little as 4 MB RAM.
The properly architected Windows NT 3.1, released two years before Windows 95, had limited MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 application support, required NT-specific drivers for all hardware, and required 12 MB RAM to boot, 16 MB to do anything useful, and you really wanted a 486 for decent performance.
Some app does some thing, then the OS reverts it! Where is "you" and "own" in this process? Do you own the "C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP" folder? Do you own the undo process?
Would your "ownership" rights increase if instead the OS didn't waste any space, but simply blocked downgrades of system components without user warning/intervention? Or had an even better process?
Also note that Microsoft Office has a long history of not following Windows rules. Microsoft didn't even set a good example.
> You see all the wacky software that doesn't follow the rules properly, does whatever it wants, breaks things.
Just like today. Software is hard, software engineering even harder.
This is truly unhinged. I wonder if running an installer under wine in win95 mode will do this.
Granted, but at the same time it's also resolutely pragmatic.
Apparently there was already lots of software out there which expected to be able to write new versions of system components. As well as buggy software that incidentally expected to be able to write old versions, because its developers ignored Microsoft's published best practices (not to mention common sense) and and didn't bother to do a version comparison first.
The choice was to break the old software, or let it think it succeeded then clean up after the mess it made. I'd bet they considered other alternatives (e.g. sandbox each piece of software with its own set of system libraries, or intercept and override DLL calls thus ignoring written files altogether) but those introduce more complexity and redirection with arguably little benefit. (I do wonder if the cleanup still happens if something like an unexpected reboot or power loss happens at exactly the wrong time).
Could the OS have been architected in a more robust fashion from the get-go? Of course.
Could they have simply forbidden software from downgrading system components? Sure, but it'd break installers and degrade the user experience.
Since the OS historically tolerated the broken behavior, they were kind of stuck continuing to tolerate it. One thing I learned leading groups of people is if you make a rule but don't enforce it, then it isn't much of a rule (at least not one you can rely on).
I would argue the deeper mistake was not providing more suitable tooling for developers to ensure the presence of compatible versions of shared libraries. This requires a bit of game theory up front; you want to always make the incorrect path frictiony and the correct one seamless.
Why did programs overwrite system components? Because Microsoft regularly pushed updates with VC++ or Visual Studio and if you built your program with Microsoft's tools you often had to distribute the updated components for your program to work - especially the Visual C runtime and the Common Controls. This even started in the Win3.11 days when you had to update common controls to get the fancy new "3d" look. And sometimes a newer update broke older programs so installers would try to force the "correct" version to be installed... but there's no better option here. Don't do that and the program the user just installed is busted. Do it and you break something else. There was no auto-update or internet access so you had to make a guess at what the best option was and hope. Mix in general lack of knowledge, no forums or Stack Overflow to ask for help, and general incompetence and you end up with a lot of badly made installers doing absolute nonsense.
Why force everyone to share everything? Early on primarily for disk space and memory reasons. Early PCs could barely run a GUI so few hundred kilobytes to let programs have their own copy of common controls was a non-starter. There was no such thing as "just wait for everyone to upgrade" or "wait for WindowsUpdate to roll this feature out to everyone". By the early 2000s the biggest reason was because we hadn't realized that sharing is great in theory but often terrible in practice and a system to manage who gets what version of each library is critical. And we also later had the disk space and RAM to allow it.
But the biggest issue was probably Microsoft's refusal to provide a system installer. Later I assume antitrust concerns prevented them from doing more in this area. Installers did whatever because there were a bunch of little companies making installers and every developer just picked one and built all their packages with it. Often not updating their installer for years (possibly because it cost a lot of money).
Note: When I say "we" here that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think the Unix world understood the need for package managers and control of library versions earlier but even then the list of problems and the solutions to them in these areas varied a lot. Dependency management was far from a solved problem.
This is bog-standard boring stuff (when presented with a similar problem, Linux invented containers lol) - read some of his other posts to realize the extent Microsoft went to maintain backwards compatibility - some are insane, some no doubt led to security issues, but you have to respect the drive.
Containers are in fact redirecting writes so an installer script could not replace system libraries.
The equivalent would be a Linux distro having the assumption that installer scripts will overwrite /usr/lib/libopenssl.so.1 with its own version and just keeping a backup somewhere and copying it back after the script executes.
No OS that I know of does that because it’s unhinged and well on Linux it would probably break the system due to ABI compatibility.
If they had taken essentially the same approach as wine and functionally created a WINEPREFIX per application then it would not be unhinged.
edit: also to be clear, I respect their commitment to backwards compatibility which is what leads to these unhinged decisions. I thoroughly enjoy Raymond Chen’s dev blog because of how unhinged early windows was.
Windows may have suffered its share of bad architectural decisions, but unhinged is a word that I wouldn't apply to their work on Windows.
You say, oh, obviously you just should redirect writes to a shadow layer or something (and later Windows can do that), but at the time they faced the rather large problem that there is no formal concept of an installer or package in Windows. An installer is just an ordinary program and the OS has no app identity available. So, how do you know when to activate this redirection, and what is the key identifying the layer to which redirects happen, and how do you handle the case where some writes are upgrades and others are downgrades, etc, and how do you do all that in a short amount of time when shipping (meant literally in those days) will start in just a few months?
As TFA says:
You even had installers that took even more extreme measures and said, “Okay, fine, I can’t overwrite the file, so I’m going to reboot the system and then overwrite the file from a batch file, see if you can stop me.”
Man, wouldn't it have been nice if everyone had enough hard drive space in those days in order to do something like that...
If an installer expects to be able to overwrite a file and fails to do so, it might crash, leaving the user with a borked installation.
Of course you can blame the installer, but resolution of the problem might take a long time, or might never happen, depending on the willingness of the vendor to fix it.
This as well. I know there are a million ways for a malicious installer to brick Win95, but a particularly funny one is hijacking the OS to perpetually rewrite its own system components back to compromised version number ∞ whenever another installer tries to clean things up.
> Basically, Windows 95 waited for each installer to finish
How could it tell that a particular process was an installer? Just anything that writes to the PROGRA~1 or WINDOWS folders?
`Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase`
In an administrator command prompt. You can thank me when it's finished ;-)
Most things just worked after being extracted like that. Some things needed a few registry entries, or regsvr32 some dll files.
Unlike <arbitrary heuristic>, it's so easy to reason about. I wish this kind of approach was still viable.
1. Convince people to distribute programs via installers.
2. Provide some way that installers can tell the OS that they're an installer (and not invent 5 different ways to do this!)
3. Convince the creators of installers to actually use that function.
4. Convince library creators to maintain backward compatibility (big ask).
5. Convince people to not fork said libraries, creating ambiguous upgrade paths.
6. If there are multiple distros, convince them all to use the same backup/restore format for libraries (and not treat their own favorite libraries as "special")
They absolutely created 10 different ways to install software; they didn't really advertised they were an installer; the only backward compatible thing there are the MS libraries; there was no common backup/restore format.
Instead, the Unix people made a mechanism for random programs to use their own libraries and not touch the system one. In fact, Windows had one too, but most applications still decided they need to break the system.
To wit. The idea that installers on Windows behaved the way I described is an interesting fact. The idea that a few installers did things in unusual ways is a much less interesting fact. Putting them on the same level robs you of the insight, and if this is a pattern then there are a lot of things you simply can't learn, because an exception could be found.
It is still blows my mind what to tell the distro flavour and version I still need to rely on the shell globbing.
Aha, that’s why they do that.
