Windows: The battle for an open standard

[@robertfindley921]

Designing consumer electronics over the years, I've had several encounters with Microsoft. All negative. They tried to force the industry to adopt their proprietary NDIS as a standard for the first DOCSIS cable modems / gateways. They threatened to not put USB drivers in their operating system if we didn't adopt it in our devices. Luckily we (3COM, Motorola, Samsung, RCA, Sony, Nortel, Toshiba, ...) stood firm.

[@graey2]

Fuck. NDIS, that is a term I haven't had nightmares about for a long time. They didn't get there in the end, but holy fuck did I have to use NDISWrapper for NDIS drivers for a while because so much hardware only came with 'decent' NDIS drivers, and that was a shitshow every time.

[@Great-Documentaries]

@robertfindley921 What a joke! You act like you and those other (mostly failed) companies are heroes. MSFT was NEVER, EVER going to not put USB drivers in their OS. That's so ludicrous you lose all credibility. You losers who lost over and over to MSFT all upvote him, but he has no clue. Every company he mentioned tried to force proprietary standards on the rest of the industry at some point. And what a joke! NDIS was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3COM! That's standing firm against MSFT, isn't it? LOL!!!!

[@Great-Documentaries]

@@graey2 Blame 3COM, the co-developers of NDIS!

[@escgoogle3865]

triggering comment please put a content warning

[@dingo596]

I like how part of this channel is just dedicated to documenting Microsoft's crimes.

[@RetroBytesUK]

It really does feel that way some times 😅

[@williambrasky3891]

You see that recent Business Insider piece penned by/ with a bunch of high level Microsoft execs? Basically alleges that Ole Billy Gates, despite “stepping down” in 2006, never stopped running the company. And not like running the company from afar. They say he is still the first to review any new product. He has to approve any major update. He is even behind the recent pivot to Ai. As far back as 2015 he was in personal talks with Sam Altman about the partnership between Microsoft & OpenAI. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have a hand in their decision to become a for profit nonprofit, but that’s just my own conjecture). He never left. No idea what the implications could be, but I’d imagine you’ve committed some serious fraud if you step down from your position as CEO of a public company then go on running the thing for almost 20 more years in secret.

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@williambrasky3891 I think we all knew after stepping down he would still have a lot of influence as the founder and a major share holder. However assuming whats in that article is true, then his current level of control goes far and above that, I dare say the SEC might have some interest in that one.

[@williambrasky3891]

@@RetroBytesUK oh absolutely. And this could have nothing to do with it, but his ex wife just cut ties & took her share from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Like I said, could be nothing, probably has nothing to do with it, but fun to speculate nonetheless.

[@sirfer6969]

Microsoft is a crime

[@TheUAoB]

Proton is just the name of Valve's Wine fork. The DX/D3D components are DXVK for up to DX11 and VKD3D for DX12. These depend upon Vulkan support, incompatible hardware can use WineD3D which is the old WINE D3D->OpenGL implementation.

[@hwertz10]

Yup! So Valve put in patches for Wine, and sometimes dxvk and vkd3d; then over time these filter back into regular wine, dxvk, and vkd3d (in general.) But the other important bit is the Mesa Gallium drivers -- as a Linux user since just before Win95 came out, my early systems didn't have 3D accelerators; if you wanted one you got an SGI. When the Voodoos and stuff came out, there was good Linux support. After that, essentially if you wanted trouble-free gaming you bought an Nvidia card; ATI was not up to snuff and besides the slowness of the Intel integrated GPUs, the 3D driver support in Linux was god-awful (the 2D was fine!). Just within the last 5-6 years, Mesa Gallium changed all that. You essentially have ATI/AMD and Intel drivers (and ones for some tablet GPUs, Mac M1/M2/M3, Qualcomm Ardreno, etc.) that run OpenGL and Vulkan up to the limits of the hardware; it goes back to shockingly old cards (I threw Ubuntu 24.04 on a Core 2 Duo and the GPU is pretty useless, but the 18 year old GPU doesn't just have some old driver that is still supported, it actually has fully modernized Mesa Gallium drivers written within the last 5-6 years!) I've personally run (with WineD3D) on a Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, this was utterly hopeless with the old drivers. With Mesa Gallium it has a go at running many DX11 games and anything older is fine. Anything much newer and you have nice Vulkan support that dxvk uses for nicer dx9/10/11 support; if it's new enough to support DX12's newer memory model (Vulkan VM_BIND support is required) you have full DX12 support through vkd3d. The nice part, since as much common code as possible is in the Mesa Gallium core, many of those fixed Valve's put in to improve performance and compatibility of the Picasso (Ryzen GPU) in the Steam Deck were to Gallium itself and improved all Gallium-supported hardware.

[@BoDiddly]

@@hwertz10 The Voodoo's worked great for me, but I had the worst times with Nvidia! For about half a decade of using Nvidia (around the time I was first thinking about switching to Linux) I had a myriad of problems that I thought were Linux, but in actuality were Nvidia. I figured this out because by chance, I bought an Intel graphics card and all of those problems went away instantly!

[@ctid107]

Thanks so much for that. I joined the Sun distributor in 1996 as a presales guy and this brought back so many memories. Solaris workstations were mandated for us and we used Wabi with Wordperfect. I also remember Wordperfect rewritten in Java running on a JavaStation. Later I remember asking customers to resend docx Word attachments as doc as StarOffice only supported the latter. Later on we all had SunPci cards in Ultra 5s, for lunchtime games we used a vga switch to use a single monitor for both. Of course MS did end up "supporting" the Open Document Format spawned by StarOffice/OpenOffice.

[@memovilmx6239]

To be fair ODF sucked huge time. Don't know if there are better implementations nowadays but back then was a terrible experience

[@RetroBytesUK]

They did implement it, but I seem to remember they implemented bits of it in odd ways, leading to their implementation being a bit broken. Not so broken, as to get in trouble, but sufficiently broken to encourage word users to stick with the old proprietary formats.

[@mark879]

Learned something new. An open Windows standard would've been nice.

[@milasudril]

Windows API is too large

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

​@@milasudril *bloated

[@milasudril]

To elaborate, for system services we already have POSIX (you will find the Windows API equivalents in kernel32.dll together with ws2_32.dll), which is good enough. What we don't have international standards for that is in Windows API include API:s regarding system configuration, general user interface, non-hardware accelerated drawing, audio, and MIDI. The interactions with files, processes and threads are easier to standardize. The UX must be allowed to be affected branding, which is very likely to leak into the API specification, especially with regards to theming. Audio interaction is not the same if you work within pro-audio compared to consumer audio.

[@c1ph3rpunk]

Nice to your psychiatrist maybe, triple those visits.

[@nazgulsenpai]

Its been 2 years since I used Windows for gaming in favor of Linux, and so far there was a grand total of 1 game that I wanted to play that did not work because anticheat, but even that now works in Linux. Its incredible how far Windows compatibility has come, and CodeWeavers and Valve deserve a ton of credit for their efforts. And GloriousEggroll, bless that man.

[@Parker8752]

Yeah; no corporation is your friend, but occasionally they can be allies for their own reasons - valve realising that putting all their eggs in the microsoft basket would be bad for them has been good for the rest of us.

[@nazgulsenpai]

@@Parker8752 well said

[@Dong_Harvey]

​@@Parker8752Valve's decision was very significant considering that Gabe Newell is the reason Windows 1.0 was completed in the first place

[@theautomaticfiend]

Codeweavers doesn't get enough credit, usually it's just valve that gets mentioned.

[@GoogleDoesEvil]

CodeWeavers wrote the worst code I've ever seen. Windows is inherently object oriented and yet they build everything in C because "Linus says C++ bad!" and they love to play compiler and exploit undocumented behavior in GCC.

[@scottlarson1548]

My favorite Microsoft interaction was when they sent an update that broke Dialup Networking. As usual they had a fix five minutes later but there was no way for our clients to download it. We asked Microsoft for permission to make copies of their fix for our clients but they told us they would consider that copyright infringement and they would have to get the fix from the Microsoft web site, the one they could no longer get to. I won't tell say what we actually did.

[@AdamChristensen]

This seems unlikely. Microsoft never restricted how patches could be distributed.

[@scottlarson1548]

@@AdamChristensen They absolutely did restrict distribution of patches and they made that perfectly clear to us. Maybe you weren't in the industry yet.

[@zh84]

EU antimonopoly law eventually forced Microsoft to publish their "secret" API. As a programmer I would love to know what the mysterious supercharged routines are!

[@aziztcf]

I guess it's just the regular routines, public ones have some delayuntiluserisannoyed() functions

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

Where was it published?

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

@@aziztcf The issue with secret APIs is that no guarantee of compatibility is made for subsequent versions of Windows, so use public APIs if you can.

[@igorgiuseppe1862]

@@aziztcf probably that and some secret questions that the os use to make sure no thirdy party is using their apis, to keep an advantage.

[@szaszm_]

@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ Except if it's used by their own office suite, because they most likely won't break their own software.

[@Dudleymiddleton]

The SUN logo is extrememly cool!

[@steveh1792]

An early batch of SUN business cards arrived with the logo printed wrong; it was straight, not rotated 45º as it was supposed to be. The marketing types handed the cards were concerned about handing them out to customers... Scott McNealy solved the problem by telling them to hand them to their customers ... rotated 45º clockwise. In short, quit complaining, get to work, we'll fix the minor problem with the next print batch. (SUN tech writer here, 1985-2009.)

[@ktxed]

clever too

[@bionicgeekgrrl]

Yes, it was always iconic growing up as there was always something with that logo wherever you looked in our house due to my father working for them, he stayed until oracle made him redundant 2 years before retirement, but he negotiated his package to avoid any pension deficit.

[@awuuwa]

I agree

[@theangrycolossal]

Only today did I figure out what is actually going on with it, and it's brilliant

[@partlyawesome]

It's disappointing that efforts towards opening the standard stopped, I wouldn't have been surprised if the efforts would have been more mature than what we have with Wine and Proton.

[@TheEvertw]

Yep, this is how it went down. In other video's RetroBytes (and @Asianometry) discussed the UNIX wars, which were happening while Windows became dominant. If one of the UNIX vendors had thought to port their OS to the 80486 for a low price, UNIX would have become dominant in the early 90ies. But the short-sighted infighting over a diminishing market ended those vendors. Linux became usable when Windows already was dominant, and has been fighting an uphill battle ever since. So, Window's success isn't only due to Bill Gates' business acumen, but also by severe mismanagement by its competitors -- who failed to realize they _were_ competitors until it was too late. The Unique Selling Point of Windows has always been its support by game vendors. Proton has finally taken that away.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

Solaris runs faster than GNU / Linux on the same hardware. I ran Solaris 2.5.1 on a 80486 and then on a Pentium 90, and it ran just fine, provided it had the drivers for everything. The only thing missing at the time was the Netscape browser for Solaris on the i86pc (which would later be corrected by porting Mozilla, respectively Firefox to Solaris). Then I got a prototype quad Pentium Pro server running at 200 MHz and we slapped Solaris 10 and ZFS on that, and that was our storage server for about a decade. I still run Solaris 10 on my intel-based PC-bucket which I built myself, and it's my primary desktop. Solaris 10 flies on it, it's so fast.

[@georgerogers1166]

BSDi lawsuit ruined that.

[@TheEvertw]

@@georgerogers1166 Yes, the BSDi lawsuit was part of the UNIX wars.

[@_chrisr_]

The problem also was that Windows 3.x/95 etc were more performant than the Unixes (even Linux) as they offered full multitasking etc whereas the Windows line used cooperative multitasking which is much faster at the cost of stability. I remember running X on 386 and 486 machines and it was noticeably slower. Once we got the more powerful hardware then the WinNT was more equivalent to Unixes of the time but had the backwards support for older apps so that was a compelling draw for customers

[@t3chrs]

SunOS ran on x86 before sparc was even around. That isn’t why “Unix lost “. Btw, there is more *nix out there today than ever before. MacOS, iOS, Android etc.

[@Cavi587]

If only Unix came to the casual user and to home PCs a lot earlier with more aggresive strategy, there is a possibility we'd be living in a Windows free world. Sadly that's not the case and after decades systems like Linux are only starting to really grow in the desktop market, but Windows is still dominant.

[@WillsJazzLoft]

Four years ago I'd switched to Linux - somewhat by accident or default. I'd not written down the product key for my copy of Windows 8.1. So when my hard drive went down, I was up the creek. It was after that that I found out about Linux and I've not looked back since then. I'm thankful everyday when I think about how much ' pain and suffering ' I've diverted since making that switch. I'm a happy camper

[@GoogleDoesEvil]

I'm going to call you a liar, by the time Windows 8.1 was out the product key was built into the system firmware.

[@sugaryhull9688]

​@@GoogleDoesEvilCould be a custom build that didn't have an existing Windows 7 key 🤷‍♀️

[@TheErador]

I believe the product key for upgrade from 7 got saved in your Microsoft account if you signed in. But Linux on the desktop is pretty fine to use, i do have a mac these days though, but i used Linux on desktop for more than a decade, I'm still sad about the end of gnome 2 - is mate still a thing?

[@RachaelSA]

Our Father, who art SUN Microsystems, Hallowed be thy name.

[@doalwa]

Amen 🙏

[@nazgulsenpai]

You spelled Oracle wrong! Seriously, RIP SUN!

[@fuller9x]

In the name of the Milner, Ellison and Oates.....Init S

[@DavidVozak]

Thanks!

[@keirthomas-bryant6116]

Having lived through his period, and being an IT journalist for much of it, and also even considering myself an amateur computing historian, I had no idea about this attempt for an open standard. Fascinating stuff, thanks.

[@gregfarley715]

Bloody hell I love a new Saturday RetroBytes video!!!!!!

[@DrTedEsq]

I really enjoyed this talk. Not what I expected... When I clicked, I was gearing up for a discussion of that time in the 1990's, when Microsoft was trying to co-opt all sorts of internet standards and pretend that the internet was a fad. Thanks again for the excellent walk down memory lane.

[@marksterling8286]

Fantastic video, I lived through pc support back through the 80s and 90s and saw the slow change from people wanting WordPerfect and lotus 123 to word and excel. Also because I did support in a large research labs the mixed and sometimes inventive approach to do word processing and email in a corporate environment with some very high end work stations. We had a ton of sgi kit that got replaced slowly with nt4 machines over just a few years

[@ctid107]

When RetroBytes appears in my subscription list, it's automatically number one to watch. Thanks.

[@RetroBytesUK]

That's nice of you to say.

[@cferrarini]

Amazing!!!! Love your videos. I knew this workstations from Comdex Shows in my schooldays in the 90s. Me and my friends didnt got the chance to use them, and there was nothing about them on the internet yet! Its interesting to see also a conversation with Dave Cutler, Microsoft Engineer from Dave´s Garage Channel, how they presented Sun Staff with a Coffin Greeting Card among other interesting stories.

[@OpenGL4ever]

I was hoping for a bit more from the interview, but in my opinion there was too little talk about Windows NT and its development. The interview with Raymond Chen on the same channel was much more informative in comparison, but that was about Windows 95.

[@MagnusVojbacke]

RB has got to be my favorite retro computing video creator!

[@RetroBytesUK]

That's kind of you to say Magnus

[@piercebros]

Great video - the API stuff is consistent in blowing my mind whenever I hear about it. Thanks mate!

[@belstar1128]

its interesting how unix went from being very expensive and only for professional to becoming free

[@sinisterpisces]

Great video. I'd forgotten all about WABI. I also always really appreciate you taking the time to explain how the various standards bodies and behind the scenes business negotiations fit into things historically. It's not just new shiny technology all the time. I didn't know about the secret API that Microsoft used for early Word/Excel on Windows, but I'm not surprised at all. It was the most vile of their evil superpowers. As a Mac user who still, 32 years later, considers Word 5.1a the peak of word processing technology, I have to admit I'm still over here boggling a bit a the abomination that was Word 6 being the deathblow to Sun. (Then again, Word 6 for Mac came later and was uniquely terrible.)

[@borlibaer]

For me it was a little efford to switch from Ami Pro / Word Pro to MS Word. Because of the "MS Standard un Business" I was forced to. My last MS Word version was "7", the user interface I hate but it was needed because I created several documentations related to enterprise IT deployments. Well, after being f*cked by the "new world order of liars and cheaters" I can enjoy all the retro stuff. Win 7 is my very last MS OS, switching to Linux for the online stuff which requires current OS. My most modern Intel box is a i3 and i5 (old VAIO Laptop) 4th Gen. . The only advantage of modern Intel based hardware is performance for cost of electricity for CAD, CGI. Electronic musical instruments and studio mixing and producer equipment are all being virtualized because of sufficient computer power. But nevertheless, in the past we had much more pleasant creativity and joy. 🖖

[@cubeflinger]

Just built a windows 98 / xp machine. It is surprising despite having lived through it, what a wild west it was back then.

[@MonochromeWench]

The bigger problem with compatibility is not the secret APIs as Microsoft needed to keep them unchanging for office but the undocumented internals of Windows that some application developers figured out and used instead of the documented APIs. It meant that every version/implemenetation of Windows needed to do things in exactly the same way or these badly behaved applications would stop working. This created big backwards compatibility headaches for Microsoft and difficulties for anyone trying to implement the Windows API. Standardising Win16 while completely missing the threat that was Windows NT and Win32 is exactly what I'd expect. Seems like a lot of people in the industry did not take Windows NT very seriously as a competitor so ignored everything about it. NT was aimed squarely at the workstation Market and they failed to act.

[@RetroBytesUK]

In the publics mind NT was the project MS was always working on yet never releasing, then when it did come out it needed a spec of PC that was outside the means of most, and it just looked like an expensive version windows 3.1 to most PC users. It did not really make much of an impact until NT4, and by then average PC specs had risen to the point where they could run NT, and some people could see the advantages in running it. However even then most users stuck with the 95, 98, ME product line. Until XP effectively made NT the default. So initially NT really did get ignored, and most where not confident MS could produce a quality workstation product. If they had not been able to hire Dave Cuttler when they did, I'm not sure they could have done.

[@Choralone422]

The OPs comment is part of the reason why the migration from XP to Vista was so painful for many application developers along with users. Under Vista many of those undocumented features that application developers (and especially malware creators!) used in Microsoft Win32 based OS from 95 through XP no longer worked. Microsoft had made major changes to many Windows APIs starting with Vista, partially due to how malware became a major widespread issue while XP was mainstream. In the 2000s and early 2010s I worked as onsite IT support for the US military. The migration from XP to Vista/Windows 7 was PAINFUL due to many specialized applications having major issues or outright not working at all under the newer OSs. It really became a war between "migrate users due to security issues w/ XP & because people very high up have ordered it" vs "migrate users & break things needed for national security & readiness" for far too long.

[@paul_boddie]

@@RetroBytesUK I guess you've read Zachary's "Showstopper". A tale of an ordeal.

[@wysoft]

​@Choralone422 I don't know that you can say it was anything developers assumed about the internals of the system so much as it was about developers assuming that their application was king - specifically that users would be running it as an Administrator level user. It was UAC that broke so many applications because they simply couldn't deal with the reality of being told "no." So registry and files stem virtualization had to come about to deal with those applications who demanded to be able to write to global locations. I remember dealing with this as far back as NT4 as I followed the practice of running as a normal user at all times - so many applications just wouldn't even run. Developers had a real multitasking, multiuser, secure system (in terms of design, not reality - NT certainly had its share of exploits), but developers still treated the application environment like it was DOS or Win 3.1/95, because they were too lazy to develop their applications to work properly in a least privileged envieonment. I don't put the blame on Microsoft here at all.

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@reecesx I have no idea who you think you are, but I'm not going to put up with rude unpleasant individuals. Also its very clear to me you've not understood this, the entire point is they did not include some calls in the public SDK, their applications instead effectively just made direct syscals (well they are not strictly speaking syscalls give the structure of the win16 code bases) which we not documented in-place of calls to the public API, levering an advantage over competitors with their knowledge of the internal structure of windows. If you're going to behave like a petulant child its probably best to be correct, rather than spraying your lack of understanding around for all to see. Given you can't be civil, I'm going to make you a hidden user, so you can comment all you like, but neither me or anyone else will ever see your comments.

[@sirfer6969]

Your summary is gold and your videos are very, very good. Thank you for producing such entertaining and interesting content.

[@darryllyle5250]

Thank you for another excellent video. All of your videos take me back to a time when computing was fun. For me, anyway.

[@RichardDzien]

I didn't even know this had been a thing. But also from the sound of it it was all over before it really began. Plus as a teenager when 95 came out etc all my knowledge came from PC magazines, whom i don't think had ever heard of Sun themselves.

[@TheSulross]

It's true that Microsoft is wasting enormous money by continuing to support the Windows kernel, which is no longer of any strategic advantage to them. Indeed it's just a maintenance millstone hanging around their corporate kneck. They could just completely concentrate all their resources on the Linux kernel, their pet distro of Linux, and incorporate Wine/Proton to be the basis of their so-called desktop Windows product - for all the users that are muscle-memory habituated to Windows GUI. No user would care less that the underlying kernel is ultimately a Linux kernel - WSL support would now just be a Linux distro-flavored simple process on said kernel. The one impediment would be the Windows ACL permissions model - that would have to be grafted in so they could have nice, performant, transparent support of their file systems and corporate software management layers. That is THE one forte of Windows desktop now - it can be locked down for corporate control and administration that exceeds all other desktop operating systems, and that is why big corporations love standardizing on Windows, because more than anything else they want to exert Orwellian Big Brother control over corporate computing resources. And Microsoft is all about enabling corporate American to achieve IT Orwellianism.

[@TenOfZero1]

Great video. Thank-you 🙂

[@gnored]

I oversaw our documentation department's move from Unix to Windows. In the process we booted Interleaf, which cost #10,000 per seat per year and couldn't even read a jpeg file, for our 640k pcs. The replacement software, Ventura, was buy-once-to-own, and it could import a huge variety of other graphics formats. Since we'd had to redraw all the dialog boxes in our software in Interleaf, and we could now just use screen captures, the savings were enormous. And frankly, the user experience was better too. I did not regret losing those Sun and Apollo workstations one little bit.

[@paul_boddie]

To be fair to the workstations, the bad experience seems to stem from Interleaf here. There were plenty of companies using products like FrameMaker fairly successfully on Unix platforms, as I recall. Obviously, as personal computers got better, the choices available to users doing any kind of publishing broadened quite a bit, which meant that some users were able to make some pretty decent savings without impacting their workflows. Others, presumably driven by the usual brand-driven consumerism pervasive in commerce and wider society, switched to things like Microsoft Word, leading to the poor-quality documentation one often sees today.

[@JamieCrookes]

Great video as always sir!

[@RobSchofield]

That was great - exactly my professional vintage 🤩

[@alexandermirdzveli3200]

Thank you for getting rid of background music! Now I can finally enjoy the video, not struggle through it.

[@lunsj]

Thanks for this. I've been trying to remember the name Wabi for ages. Back in the late 90s I attended a Linux conference and someone had a box showing off Wabi running Windows 3.1. I couldn't remember that name and kept thinking of Wubi which is Ubuntu's solution for running on Windows.

[@JamesHalfHorse]

I never had a lot of need to get into the Sun world but my roomie did. He says it basically died for him when all the support resources taken away/paywalled after a buyout. I think he even has/had a Sun laptop which is something I have yet to see a review of anywhere.

[@ScarletSwordfish]

MS ceasing production of Windows - what a bright, happy future that would be!

[@sydtopia1]

Just after I think I know al the history about computers, this video shows how little I know. Great video. :)

[@spencerholdaway]

Great vid. It wasn't just that Word Perfect was slower, the early windows versions were so full of bugs probably due to the API or Microsoft making it purposely difficult that it was an awful experience. You should also cover the disaster that was Novell deciding it was a good idea to take on Microsoft with an Office suite! Funnily enough, Word Perfect is in there.

[@Hiddenus1]

4:20 this installer window looks... Quite familiar... Almost like some system unrelated to SUN had same looking installation process up to 2006 :D

[@SpiffingNZ]

10 years from now is the year of the Linux Desktop???

[@RetroBytesUK]

Its a different predicitoon to next year will be the year of linux on the desktop. In 10 years I think the desktop market will be considerably smaller with the growth in BYOD in business and MS will simply nolonger care.

[@judewestburner]

Every year is ten years

[@memovilmx6239]

Yup since 1991. 10 years from now will be the Linux desktop year.

[@shadowangel8005]

Linux is improving fast, theres a few rough edges still though for gamers, everyday users.

[@mindaugasstankus5943]

In decade desktop may not exist. Everything else already Linux, BSD or some RTOS.

[@hhgttm]

Thanks for another enlightening and enjoyable video on a topic I didn’t know about. The idea of trying to create an open standard around someone else’s product seems bonkers! If it had happened, the world could be a very different place today. But as you pointed out, it was a time where technology evolved so fast that any attempt would have been negated by advancement anyway! This might have forced 16bit Windows to hold on longer than it did though. Thank goodness for true open source technology becoming so pervasive.

[@kFY514]

The odd outcome of this whole story is that if you want to create a "build once, run anywhere" binary then your best shot in the modern day is actually a Windows EXE. It'll run on Windows natively, on Linux via Wine, on macOS via CrossOver Wine (with x86 emulation handled by Rosetta if necessary)... You just need to keep Wine among the platforms you test on. Unless of course you write it as a web application and bundle it with the appropriate Electron binaries if necessary...

[@RetroBytesUK]

Targeting GTK with native code also works rather well too, assuming its just a regualr desktop app. As gtk is availbe for every major platform, and some of the more obsure ones.

[@cyneater6300]

love the channel once again learn something also relived memories of computing

[@larsiparsii]

Great video! I watched the whole thing. Promise!

[@larsiparsii]

I feel asleep :(

[@fiveminutezen]

At least PCB way sponsors videos that are targeted to a receptive audience. I would totally use PCB way if I ever had a project that I could use them for.

[@NoobsDeSroobs]

Receptive? What do you mean by that?

[@fiveminutezen]

@@NoobsDeSroobsWell I am usually watching videos about making things and engineering. I may at some point have a reason to use PCB way. Whereas with Nord VPN, I suppose anyone can use a VPN but it doesn't apply to me specifically.

[@igorgiuseppe1862]

its funny to think that you could plug an pc into another using an pci port, but its not surprising at all, you could do something like that with the n64 and sgi computers if you had an nintendo sdk and hardware development kit. i think there is a similiar thing to develop games for android but im not rich so i just an usb cable or plug it with wifi.

[@paulbrooks4395]

Microsoft has been hedged in by all the API and libraries they have released. Since every API release is used by virtually everyone, it's going to get decompiled and put into the Linux abstraction layer. Since MS is the de facto standard, they can't stop supporting old APIs, so those will remain indefinitely for people to study and refine. As for the cloud and Azure, they know they have to compete with everyone else and can't develop enough quality or compatibility with the Linux kernel through Windows. Thus they have to use Linux to get cloud devs and customers. The argument about the cloud wars is rather "who comes out on top"? Right now we have a de defacto standard in storage in S3, which came from Amazon. The more concerning future is one where a cloud platform vendor pushes out all the vendors, leaving us with an abstracted, homogeneous stack running on proprietary code where access is always limited to high level APIs. In that future, we all become limited users of megacorps with total control over APIs and codebases.

[@MoonlightEmbrace]

I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned ReactOS as well apart from WINE given that it’s basically to Windows what Linux was to UNIX

[@e8root]

Wine is quite good for games. There are some games which still seem to run slower and where it matters and you need to at times fiddle with wrapper DLLs but overall for playing some Unity indie games (which are the best anyways...) games run more than well enough to not notice any difference. At times games run even better than on Windows, especially older games.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Indeed, I've got Windows 9x games and programs that run as well in Wine as they did in Windows 95 and 98 -- and better than they did in XP and 7. Not to mention Win16 games (like the old Windows Entertainment Packs) that won't run _at all_ in 64-bit Windows.

[@aviumcaravan]

Wine-style binfmt compat layer running on top of POSIX made before Wine: 2 ...that's not a lot, but it's weird how i keep on finding out about these

[@KevinVeroneau]

I find it quite interesting that Sun prefixed their successive chips in how Nintendo prefixed their successive consoles, as the Nintendo 64 was going to be released as "Ultra 64".

[@scottfranco1962]

Steamdeck is not really enabled by Wine so much as Open3d. Wine just serves as the OS adaption layer. The game engines all use Open3d.

[@mycosys]

YARGLBLURG! I was running Unix SystemV (Specifically SCO Xenix with the MICMARC indexing system, written in MSCOBOL) on a 386 in 1990, mulit-user, multi-terminal.

[@zxrenew5642]

Brilliant again!

[@jj_and_the_jaysjays6316]

Nice video!!

[@EtherRainbow]

only video criticism of this video is the transition static noise is way too loud

[@videodrone9558]

You got the bits about Hyper-V wrong; Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, it doesn't run *ontop* of any operating system. It becomes the Operating system and runs virtual machines on top. When you install Hyper-V on a windows workstation, the OS you "see" is a privileged VM. Hyper-V is Ring -1, the host OS becomes part of the parent partition on Ring 0. Type 2 Hypervisors run on top of a host operating system; this is hypervisors like virtual box (no direct hardware access). So, Hyper-V doesn't "run" on Linux in Azure, Hyper-V is Hyper-V. (Consumer version of this is now called Azure Stack HCI, previously Windows Hyper-V Server)

[@SixthDemon]

Thank for interesting story. While gaming relevant aspects are covered within Wine, there are plenty of APIs with user32 as well as in Kernel which Wine and other emulators are not utilizing.

[@mrbi1198]

"In a world without fences, who needs Gates?" - Scott McNealy

[@kmg501]

Never trust Microsoft, NEVER.

[@tiberiusbrain]

Thing is, same goes for google and apple.

[@dookucount]

Trust any for-profit company to be in it for profit. 😉

[@davel4030]

Who does? Always look over your shoulder.

[@knoxduder]

Never trust anyone that tells you to never trust .

[@Dr.Dawson]

Couldn’t agree more.

[@Ned47628]

I'm now thinking about one of those sun boards and wondering about putting one in a PC.

[@fattomandeibu]

Having a separate monitor for playing games happened to me with my A1200 of all things in around '96 or so. As a cheeky teenager, I'd developed a "business" of charging people a fiver for writing up CVs in Wordsworth, and also some basic book keeping stuff for the likes of the local window cleaner during tax season. Of course, doing all this at a resolution of 640x288(there was an interlaced mode available, but it gave me a headache after about 10 minutes) become pretty tiresome pretty quick, so I got a VGA monitor and an Amiga RGB to VGA cable. When attempting to run a game, it would switch to 15.5kHz, and being that this was a monitor I bought for 30 quid, it didn't like that one bit, so I also had to have an old TV hooked via RF for when I wanted to play a game. All this so I could fund my gaming habit and get myself a PlayStation and N64 plus games... then again, I suppose nothing much has changed in almost 30 years...

[@GeoNeilUK]

Microsoft have made a last gasp at a proprietary standard with UWP from Windows 8 onwards, I'm not sure if Wine support that yet. I think the XBOX One and XBOX Series consoles are based on UWP too. Tough to be honest, a lot of the apps on the Microsoft Store are just Win32 apps in an MSIX installer.

[@SomeMorganSomewhere]

LOL that RISC OS shade ;)

[@RetroBytesUK]

I have a friend as Uni, who had a risc PC and spent the entire degree getting java working on it. He finally got him self a strongarm cpu upgrade in the end so he could finally use floating point in java. Just in time for acorn to discontinue the risc pc and clise its doors

[@paul_boddie]

@@RetroBytesUK The A7000+ was the machine you wanted if you needed floating-point support. Overall performance wasn't as good as the StrongARM, obviously, but the ARM7500FE with its built-in FPU outperforms the StrongARM doing FP emulation. If the SA-1500 had made it through the DEC-Intel transaction, I would imagine that it would have appeared in an A7000-like machine in preference to the Risc PC, which was pretty overrated as it was. However, I would agree that RISC OS wasn't really the platform you wanted to use if things like Java were your priority. At that point, the whole ship was drifting aimlessly towards its eventual asset-stripped demise.

[@Christobanistan]

The Windows API IS ALREADY open. The courts long ago resolved this question. APIs cannot be copyrighted, only their implementations can. That's why people were able to clone IBM's BIOS, which is an API. The Windows API HAS been implemented via the "Wine" open source project and other projects. It's far from perfect, mainly because it's hard to perfectly duplicate behaviors, especially when they're constantly changing, but an alternate implementation of Windows does exist and is in wide use. It's just not good enough for most apps.

[@arnechino]

That thumbs up almost "fell out" the screen :)

[@BanazirGalpsi1968]

PCBway made the board for commander x 16

[@Sauceyjames]

Thumbs up 👍🏽

[@Elizabeth-vh6il]

Sun Microsystems taking a leaf out of Commodore's Bridgeboard idea there.

[@paul_boddie]

Plenty of companies took that route. Acorn did so as well with the same motivation: to allow users to keep their existing machines and give them a way to run DOS and Windows applications on it with reasonable performance. Indeed, Acorn went back and forth on this, initially planning a 286 card for their Archimedes machine, then providing a software emulator, then adopting third-party x86 cards, before going all-in on a dual-processor architecture with the Risc PC. The problem with this approach is that it never really appealed to people just wanting to run DOS and Windows applications, it often didn't provide great performance, it usually involved weird workarounds and compromises, and buying a separate PC was probably better, too, since you could then have another machine for someone to use. And offering such things proved to be a huge distraction from just getting native applications onto the host platform, whether that was AmigaDOS, RISC OS, MacOS, SunOS, or whatever. You can see why cooler heads prevailed and they bought StarOffice instead of continuing to believe that people would be happy running a Windows version of Word in a weird compatibility environment.

[@Ginto_O]

Its mind-blowing to see that photoshop's new file dialog havent changed in 40 years (or 35 whatever)

[@RetroBytesUK]

It is surprising how much of these applications don't change from one release to the next.

[@BurritoVampire]

"Moooomm!! Can I watch the new Saturday morning RetroBytes?! This one looks like it's about a battle of good vs. evil!"

[@gavinguy148]

I’m still surprised the eu didn’t step in with windows 11 and it’s hardware compatibility requirements that have been proved time and time again to be fake limitations. Microsoft circle of life!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Saddly regualators seem to always lag about a decade behind. They never get ahead of these things. Look how long its taken the EU to finally deal with the app store situation on iPhones.

[@CrackDavidson1]

Only after the e-waste problem becomes clearly noticeable in the waste management sector *maybe* then? But kind of late as people and companies already have their new HW... :/

[@Stephen.Bingham]

I think Windows NT played a big role in killing the proprietary Unix vendors. In the late nineties most of the science and engineering community moved to NT workstations as they provided much better bang for the buck and a single software target - rather than the fractured market of proprietary Unix and RISC processors. The same seemed to happen in the server world at that point. Thankfully Linux came to the rescue in both fields more recently.

[@paul_boddie]

Microsoft hyped NT even while they were still struggling to put it together, and the computing press lapped it up with things like Byte's "Is Unix dead?" cover from September 1992, hyping NT almost a year before it came out. Of course, the Unix vendors didn't exactly help themselves, but putting their squabbles aside for the most part, there was a coherent technological platform for Unix applications from 1993 onwards: you'd see Unix workstations from Sun, HP, IBM and DEC all with the same user interface. Where most of the Unix vendors slipped up was to partner with Microsoft. DEC famously did so several times, initially by accepting Microsoft's role in the Advanced Computing Environment initiative which was, for Microsoft, arguably only a means to frighten Intel into getting faster chips to market, plus build up hype for NT in whatever form it was to take. DEC later "won" the right to port NT to Alpha, believing that this would be an enduring product that would see Alpha hit the mainstream, only for Microsoft to again leave their partners high and dry. SGI was a more curious case, being duped by both Microsoft and Intel, introducing generic NT workstations and thus hollowing out their existing business, and dropping MIPS for Itanium which was only good for a specialised class of products. Interestingly, by then, SGI had adopted Linux and the broader industry was starting to coalesce around Linux. Even Sun's efforts with Wabi was a distraction, seemingly a tactic to unsettle Microsoft, it undermined Sun's own software strategy. They would have been far better off just paying to get productivity applications made for their platform, which they effectively did with StarOffice somewhat later on.

[@OpenGL4ever]

Linux was not a savior for the classic Unix systems, Linux was the nail in their coffin. Windows NT made many companies switch from Unix to Windows NT, but Linux finished them off and pushed the Unix systems out of the market.

[@DavePoo2]

Is it better to have one dominant overlord OS that everyone is using or loads of competing ones?

[@RetroBytesUK]

Different OSs suite different workloads and use cases, so its probably good we still have some variety. Although there are a lot less these days still in commerial use.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

@@RetroBytesUK Solaris can do everything well, even video games; I do all my multimedia work on Solaris 10. If game companies supported it, Solaris would be a better gaming substrate than Windows 11 is, especially since one can switch to the realtime scheduler in it.

[@playswithblades]

I am so grateful you released a video I can enjoy on my earphones while my roomate went full swine mode slurping and chewing like a pig on his dinner. You, dear sir, just prevented a murder. Thank you. Edit: Getting ran over by a motorbike is not bad, getting ran over by a SUV is not bad for us who are into that kind of thing, but I'll definitely agree that getting ran over by a 20 ton truck sucks. Bigtime. Large tractors too. As a person who enjoys getting ran over by vehicles because, why not, I do not approve this comparison. Motorbikes and normal cars (tesla cybertruck sucks, I do not want to feel another one of those damn things ever again), are much more like windows 98SE than Windows 1.0 (50ccm motorbike). I would compare windows 11 experience to getting ran over by a 20 ton truck. Maybe that would be fair. And this piece of shit is still slurping soup. Need to restart the video.

[@kjrehberg]

Azure runs Hyper-V on Windows on their VM hosts, not Linux.

[@yuho865]

ow that noise burst at 1:43 are you trying to deafen people

[@TParekowhai]

MS Windows in 2024 is a advert platform that gathers every bit of data, includes functions that are only picture icon and do not work e.g. Windows update button to stop update for a time but when first login if goto Updates it is already working / searching for updates / sending or gathering data. I unplug my internet connection and the latest update Windows disables my VPN from starting at bootup. I use to like Windows 3.0 etc. as leant in MS DOS considering a less invasive OS Linux etc. Middle finger MS.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

7:57 Tfw dynamic recompiler.

[@the.azrider]

Watched 'till the end and thought "Wubuntu"

[@maniacaudiophile]

One interesting thing with Proton and Wine is that they got a massive boost because of a talented guy want to play Nier Automata on his Linux machine.

[@jaffarbh]

Something I think was missed in this awesome video is WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). While not perfect, I use it quite a bit for my AI stuff. It's essentially a VM that has full access to any GPU so you can, for example edit photos in Photoshop in Windows while training AI in WSL at the same time. It's pretty convenient and productive.

[@plateoshrimp9685]

But can you put a PC PCI card in a PC and run Windows in a window on Windows?

[@adambishop4655]

Yassss new RetroBytes

[@dismuter_yt]

The year of Linux on the Desktop will be when help pages don't contain command line instructions, where almost everything can be done with clicks of the mouse, and you can download drivers for your device from the manufacturer's website and install them with a few easy clicks.

[@Longlius]

What drivers are you installing on Linux in 2024? Everything comes in the kernel now.

[@paul_boddie]

@@Longlius Indeed. Installing drivers from vendor Web sites is something you'd expect LGR to cover on some kind of Oddware episode. It might have been the done thing on Windows about twenty years ago, but I think that even the average captive Windows purchaser stopped doing that quite some time ago.

[@Longlius]

@@paul_boddie For real. Even on my Windows machine, the only drivers I've ever really bothered with are GPU drivers. But that's because 'GPU drivers' on Windows are more along the lines of something like mesa + the actual drivers you'd get in the Linux kernel.

[@dismuter_yt]

@@Longlius No, not everything comes in the kernel. If you have newer hardware, distros can take time to include newer kernel versions containing the drivers or fixes. Back in 2020, to fix an issue with my new Threadripper system (I think it was with USB controllers), I had to manually grab a patch from a mailing list, apply it to the kernel source code, recompile the kernel for my Fedora distro. The fix took many weeks to come downstream and I could not wait. On Windows, you download the update and install it in 2 clicks, done. For some distros like Debian, drivers for new devices don't even make it in until the next major release. Whereas on Windows, such drivers are decoupled from the kernel, so they can be available faster and in a more convenient manner. There's also likely to be a bunch of devices on the market that will never have their drivers in the kernel (one reason being they're closed source) nor in all of the distro package managers. It just makes more sense for drivers to be separate and have their own independent delivery system.

[@mgord9518]

In other words: "The year of Linux on the desktop is when Linux becomes Windows" Yeah, I think I'm fine with Linux being niche. Pandering to stupid people ruins technology

[@noahk1720]

You really piqued my interest when you said that "Azure mostly runs Linux", and "Microsoft ported their Hyper-V hypervisor platform to Linux". I don't think that's correct...all I was able to find is evidence to the contrary, that the Azure Cloud Host is more or less a typical Hyper-V server (i.e. Hyper-V is the type 1 hypervisor, managed by NT running atop) with some added APIs and the barest of minimum Win32 APIs to run a CMD window.

[@GoogleDoesEvil]

You're right

[@judewestburner]

Microsoft were playing the long game Sun and Next didn't know they were in. They brought out these modern computers doing all the stuff you want to do, whereas Microsoft were waiting for commodity hardware to get good enough and put their efforts into that knowing the high end would get eaten up.

[@georgerogers1166]

BSDi lawsuit killed it.

[@whtiequillBj]

I'm unsure if Microsoft still is but, I believe back in 2016 Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation.

[@Underestimated37]

Yeah but I’d Chalk that up to their EEE strategy they’ve been using publicly and secretly since the 90s. They claim they don’t do it, but their behaviour suggests otherwise.

[@greenrocket23]

Thank God for Linux Mint

[@user-rx8lz6yz4f]

The only reason not to use Linux now is if you need the Adobe suite. I guess there may be some other issues but man, as a sysadmin life would be good if everything ran on Linux with auto mounts and no more cifs. 🙏

[@GoogleDoesEvil]

I don't want to use Linux because Unix is awful 🙏

[@sundhaug92]

24:15 Microsoft actually has multiple Linux-distros, and are part of the Linux foundation

[@markwarner5554]

Microsoft has been decoupling windows user space from kernal space for a while, so I think windows will eventually run on a Linux kernel.

[@keyboard_g]

Microsoft used private apis and changing file formats to subterfuge Sun, and did the same with networking to rug pull Novell. Dos was stolen from CPM, and Windows 1-3 were all inferior to Amiga Workbench and MacOS.

[@RKingis]

Actually, Microsoft bought Quick & Dirty Operating System (QDOS).

[@OpenGL4ever]

DOS was not stolen vom CPM, DOS was only compatible with CPM in such a way that it required only a few changes to the source code of a CPM application to make it run under DOS. However, the DOS API was significantly expanded and thus offered more than CPM. In the end, Digital Research copied the DOS API when they created DR-DOS.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

MS being sneaky and not playing fair... imagine my shock ;) Not that Sun were ever saint, for that matter. You don't get to market dominance and trillions of $ by being a nice guy, ever.

[@knoxduder]

I know it’s popular to *&it on Windows and Microsoft, but I would argue despite not being perfect, they’ve brought a lot to the table and have managed to accomplish some amazing things, at scale no less. I also loved Vista, and really like my Windows 10 with OneDrive. I would also argue every platform has its own list of pros and cons. But I’m just someone that needs things to work seamlessly on a daily basis, for years.

[@controlfreak1963]

As someone that started with computers in the late 70's, I'm afraid I have to side with Microsoft as they finally made us a stable OS in the mid 90's (NT) that allowed engineering software to run on inexpensive computers from many companies instead of expensive proprietary workstations. I had industrial control system servers running for months without a hiccup. The application software would typically crash before the OS gave us any issues. They were obviously a ruthless company but that never really touched me so I didn't care. When my competitors were siding with Sun OS and OS/2 I directed all my resources to MS and it payed off in spades. The control systems servers I installed in 1995 ran for 20 years with OS and hardware upgrades and my competitors couldn't support their systems after 5 to 10 years before requiring full replacements.

[@paul_boddie]

Linux was already viable from around 1995 onwards for low-cost workstation use. You could see it in academia, being supported by the same people who had been supporting all the different proprietary Unix platforms. In the commercial world, particularly as the dot-com era approached, there was more appetite for buying expensive Sun products with all that easy venture capital funding, and this in combination with Microsoft's coercion of hardware vendors meant that many purchasers weren't readily able to easily adopt Linux. Obviously, IBM and Sun eventually adopted Linux: IBM did so strategically, having seen Workplace OS and their OS/2 strategy fail, and Sun needing to recalibrate their business model after the dot-com bubble burst. But beyond Sun's attempts to make GNOME slightly more sane, none of the big vendors had the appetite to promote Linux on the desktop. As for whether Microsoft's behaviour affected you or me, it actually affected the entire industry.

[@controlfreak1963]

@@paul_boddie Linux was not supported by any of the industry standard control software available at the time. There was also no crystal ball on what Linux would become. I used Linux back then and it was woefully unable to be used in a production environment (this was not a research environment). By the mid 90's, the application software directed which OS to use, not the other way around.

[@paul_boddie]

@@controlfreak1963 Sure, Linux wasn't significantly adopted by the commercial world until the turn of the century or slightly later, I would say. However, as soon as things like SGI's Altix started coming along, I think you have to admit that it had a non-trivial level of corporate adoption. I can't comment on the industrial control system world, but my point was that Linux would have been a reliable product for many applications, and that adoption was happening already in the mid-1990s. You're making assumptions about "research environment" deployments: I'm talking about machines people used day in, day out to do their work, just like the proprietary Unix workstations they augmented and replaced. As for the crystal ball, as soon as IBM started ploughing money into Linux, it was quite clear that it was going to be sticking around. The industry wanted to coalesce around a common Unix standard, and IBM, Sun, SGI all chose Linux for that, with varying levels of enthusiasm.

[@controlfreak1963]

@@paul_boddie The "Linux is always an option" seems to come from those not focused on the application software (usually IT folks or web/cloud devs). Ignition was really the first control software platform that could comfortably run on Linux but it didn't become viable until the late 2010's or over 20 years after NT 4 was released and a few years before I retired. Even then, Windows is still typically used as the visualization workstation with the server side on Linux. Why? Because their are a billion Linux display standards but only one on Windows.

[@paul_boddie]

@@controlfreak1963 Again, you're putting words into my mouth. I was merely pointing out that those providers of "engineering software" running on "expensive proprietary workstations" had another option on the table from the mid-1990s onwards, at least if those workstations were running Unix. They had multiple options if you include the Free Software BSDs. Otherwise, you seem to be eager to assert that my own use-cases and experiences are somehow not as valid as yours. You are welcome to your perspective, I suppose.

[@nanothrill7171]

that sun drip