It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.
Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".
My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.
The equivalent in the win world to obscure command line settings is the registry. There is a whole heap of documented and undocumented config in there. 99% of the time you don't really need to go in there, but its often the more automatable way and occasionally you will find some fun options.
Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.
No floppy or CD? You were just asking for trouble then IMHO. It was common to have to reinstall windows every 6-9 months in the win9x days. That didn't even really work for ME, but by then win2000 came in to save the day. Software was primarily distributed on CD those days, being without a CD drive must have been a huge hardship.
I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.
I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .
It's a barrier not because it is hard, but because people are not familiar with it. Ask a non-technical user using the GUI to edit their display settings and they'll be equally flummoxed.
Grandma gets her computer setup by family, Katie probably has tech support or a managed device. I've been setting up Linux for friends and relatives and apart from 1-2 niche issues I didn't even have to do any support because stuff just works.
You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.
Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.
I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.
I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)
Grandma, if she is on linux I probably set it up for her and left myself ssh access so I can update/fix it for her. Katie from HR shouldn't touch settings she should file a ticket and wait for the helpdesk monkey or IT to fix it.
Frankly, scripting makes it easier form me to help users: "double click on this when you return home. It will put your computer on the correct wifi, give it a fixed ip address, and poison your hosts file so that stupid NAS works and then setup a guest mount for the two SMB share that are still using SMB 1.0"
Interestingly, I feel polar opposite to you. Digging through a clunky GUI, going multiple levels deep, to find a tick box is annoying.. When I can just run a single one-line to achieve what I need. I suppose different strokes..
I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.
And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.
Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.
The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.
Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
Well, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.
Clicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT.
In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker that is based on the classic pickers default colour set. Which were chosen because they dither nicely to 16 colours with the Windows 3.x dither algorithm.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
> "in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it"
This is how I think about music and Spotify. Pretty much all music exists, you 'just' have to remember everything that exists and what it's called so you can find it.
Recent HN link, Red Alert 2 in your web browser. A game from 25 years ago which you can unofficially download the C++ original version from the Internet Archive to upload to the website which extracts the assets to play in a Javascript based reimplementation inside a web hypertext document browser.
My personal collection got so big I started forgetting what was in it lol. I had to write a program to catalog everything and present a directory tree of genre combinations with FUSE
What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified.
Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other article seems to imply Windows 95 used UTF16 (or UCS2, but either way 16-bit chars) so I'm confused about porting code being a problem. Was it that the APIs in 95 were still kind of a halfway point?
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit.
As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet".
By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented
That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.
Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.
Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.
UTF-8 was invented in 1992 and was first published in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 had its first public demo in 1991, was scheduled for release in 1992 and was released in 1993.
Technically UTF-8 was invented before the first Windows NT release, but they would have had to rework a nearly finished and already delayed OS
Also keep in mind that ISO’s official answer was UTF-1 not UTF-8, and UTF-8 wasn’t formally accepted as part of the Unicode and ISO standards until 1996. And early versions of UTF-8 still allowed the full 31 bit range of the original ISO 10646 repertoire, before it was limited to the 21 bit range of UTF-16. Also, a lot of early UTF-8 implementations were actually what we now call CESU-8, or had various other infelicities (such as accepting overlong encodings, nowadays commonly disabled as a security risk). So even in 1993, I’m not sure it was yet clear that UTF-8 was going to win.
Oh god, this again. One word: "History". No one thought we would need more than 16 bits (65k chars) to represent all the world's written languages. Then it happened. There must be no less than one thousand individually authored blog posts and technical articles on this matter. Win32, Java, and Qt all suffer from the same UTF-16 internal representation. There has been endless discussion on the matter over the last 10 years about how to change these frameworks to use UTF-8 internal representation. It is a crazy hard problem.
The tragic part is how brief the period of time was between “ascii and a mess of code pages” and the problem actually getting solved with Unicode 2.0 and UTF-8.
Unicode 1.0 was in 1991, UTF-8 happened a year later, and Unicode 2.0 (where more than 65,536 characters became “official”, and UTF-8 was the recommended choice) was in 1996.
That means if you were green-fielding a new bit of tech in 1991, you likely decided 16 bits per character was the correct approach. But in 1992 it started to become clear that maybe a variable with encoding (with 8 bits as the base character size) was on the horizon. And by 1996 it was clear that fixed 16-bit characters was a mistake.
But that 5-year window was an extremely critical time in computing history: Windows NT was invented, so was Java, JavaScript, and a bunch of other things. So, too late, huge swaths of what would become today’s technical landscape had set the problem in stone.
UNIXes only use the “right” technical choice because it was already too hard to move from ASCII to 16-bit characters… but laziness in moving off of ASCII ultimately paid off as it became clear that 16-bits per character was the wrong choice in the first place. But otherwise UNIX would have had the same fate.
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
I don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)
Probably a mix of this, and also that it feels like there have been many strikingly different milestones for Windows as a product since Win95, while git is not fundamentally different since 2006/07, or at least change has been far more gradual. Windows is so storied it feels older.
There’s been two main massive shifts that create before-and-after feelings in tech. One is going from “the computer is that super-typewriter that can send mail” to internet culture, and the second is going from online in pcs to always online in smartphones.
Win 95 feels from era1, xp and git was already in era 2.
Once those two changes were done by 2010 though, there’s been no game changer, if anything we've regressed through shittyfication (we seem to have fewer social networks vs the original Facebook for example, as most of them turned single player feed consumption).
Maybe pre and post LLMs will feel like an era change in a decade as well?
I remember the days of NT4 and the guy that would lock a file, leave for the day and you couldn't check it out :D Good times!
Same year I deleted all our customer's websites by simply dragging the hosting folder somewhere into C:\programs or something by mistake... A double click + lag turned into a drag and drop! Whoops!
I was pale as a ghost as I asked for the zip drive.
We had to reboot the file server first, which we did a swift kick to the power button.
At least today we employ very secure mechanisms; like YAML rollouts of config, to keep things interesting.
Perforce is standard in gamedev currently. As a programmer first and foremost, I prefer git but I've certainly come to appreciate the advantages of Perforce and it's an overall better fit for (bigger) game projects.
Yes, Perforce handles large files, and large folders of files, very well. It's quite efficient with deltas in binary files. It's also very useful that Perforce expects clients to check out only a part of the depot. There are folders with raw assets like uncompressed sound, layered graphics and all that, I don't check out any of that, I only check out the necessary in-engine assets.
For code, I prefer git as I said, but in a game's depot most files are not code, and Perforce is built around handling those other assets well.
Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
> Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though.
It just really highlights how much better BitKeeper and then Git's design was compared to what came before. You then pile on being free/OSS, and being "proven" by an extremely large, well known, and successful project on top, and you have yourself explosive growth.
There are developers around these days who never had the displeasure of using the pre-Git source control offerings; it was rough.
You can use `git format-patch` to export a range of commits from your local git tree as a set of patches. You can then use `git send-email` to send that patch set out to the appropriate mailing list and maintainers (or just do it in one step, send-email accepts a similar commit range instead of patch files). It talks directly to an SMTP server you have configured in your `.gitconfig` and sends out e-mail.
Of course, `git send-email` has a plethora of options, e.g. you'd typically add a cover letter for a patch set.
Also, in the Linux kernel tree, there are some additional helper scripts that you might want to run first, like `checkpatch.pl` for some basic sanity checks and `get_maintainer.pl` that tells you the relevant maintainers for the code your patch set touches, so you can add them to `--cc`.
The patches are reviewed/discussed on the mailing list that you sent them to.
On the receiving side, as a maintainer, you'd use `git am` (apply mail) that can import the commits from a set of mbox files into your local git tree.
For most people, git is that you work with pull requests, and already early on some bristled at the term “patches” which implied an obsolete way of working.
and even then, it's easy for merges to turn into chaos, git has no semantic awareness (no surprises here) and sometimes similar patterns will end up collapsed as a single change and conflict
As much as the tech industry loves to hate on Microsoft, it’s really quite amazing what they were able to do with fairly primitive tools operating on huge, complex code bases.
@dang: It would be nice if we can add an exception to these URLs. Currently, the domain hint only says: "microsoft.com". It would be better if it said: "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" or "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". I think we did something similar with forbes.com to illuminate when it was a blog (which are frequently low quality), instead of the official media website.
Ok, that should be done now. I'm not happy about how much screen space "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" takes up, so I might look into rewriting these to "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". On the other hand, that's arguably a bit misleading too.
It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.
Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".
My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.
The equivalent in the win world to obscure command line settings is the registry. There is a whole heap of documented and undocumented config in there. 99% of the time you don't really need to go in there, but its often the more automatable way and occasionally you will find some fun options.
and unsuprisingly that's considered one of the worst parts of windows
Once upon a time, someone at Microsoft wished on a monkey's paw for a way to replace thousands of undocumented INI files throughout the filesystem.
It curled, and we got the registry.
Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.
No floppy or CD? You were just asking for trouble then IMHO. It was common to have to reinstall windows every 6-9 months in the win9x days. That didn't even really work for ME, but by then win2000 came in to save the day. Software was primarily distributed on CD those days, being without a CD drive must have been a huge hardship.
I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.
I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .
It's a barrier not because it is hard, but because people are not familiar with it. Ask a non-technical user using the GUI to edit their display settings and they'll be equally flummoxed.
Grandma gets her computer setup by family, Katie probably has tech support or a managed device. I've been setting up Linux for friends and relatives and apart from 1-2 niche issues I didn't even have to do any support because stuff just works.
You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.
Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.
I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.
I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)
Grandma, if she is on linux I probably set it up for her and left myself ssh access so I can update/fix it for her. Katie from HR shouldn't touch settings she should file a ticket and wait for the helpdesk monkey or IT to fix it.
Frankly, scripting makes it easier form me to help users: "double click on this when you return home. It will put your computer on the correct wifi, give it a fixed ip address, and poison your hosts file so that stupid NAS works and then setup a guest mount for the two SMB share that are still using SMB 1.0"
Interestingly, I feel polar opposite to you. Digging through a clunky GUI, going multiple levels deep, to find a tick box is annoying.. When I can just run a single one-line to achieve what I need. I suppose different strokes..
MacOS has the best of both worlds - you can interact with propertylists through the gui, or you can use the commandline.
I agree
as a long time windows user, I wish linux copied this feature more
I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.
And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.
Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.
The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.
Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
Would be nice in theory, if MS didn't make Windows 10 and 11 outright disobey group policies.
In Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box:
ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit)
Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory
I wonder if the Add Fonts dialog survived to Windows 10: https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-i... - during the time Microsoft had 2 designs for settings/control panels, making the OS look like a mess coded by drunks...
Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.
Well, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.
Clicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT.
In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker that is based on the classic pickers default colour set. Which were chosen because they dither nicely to 16 colours with the Windows 3.x dither algorithm.
Custom word widgets in that zoom dialog, the scroll wheel doesn’t even work in the spinner box.
Extant versions of the work-in-progress Shell Technology Preview “NewShell” on NT 3.51, with screenshots: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Shell_Technology_Preview
Windows is like real life archeology. You can dig up the UI of ancient generations of humans before you underneath the modern facade.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
> "in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it"
This is how I think about music and Spotify. Pretty much all music exists, you 'just' have to remember everything that exists and what it's called so you can find it.
Recent HN link, Red Alert 2 in your web browser. A game from 25 years ago which you can unofficially download the C++ original version from the Internet Archive to upload to the website which extracts the assets to play in a Javascript based reimplementation inside a web hypertext document browser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853
My personal collection got so big I started forgetting what was in it lol. I had to write a program to catalog everything and present a directory tree of genre combinations with FUSE
ironically, that link 404s...
Hah, so it is! Sorry about that. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>
Really wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
You still can. Run any program in compatibility mode; the Windows 2000 boxy UI is still there. As is the Windows Vista Aero Basic theme.
Like I always say, the user-mode of Windows is easiest to change, that's why it has been done almost every version.
Yes please! Speaking of which, was it Window Blinds(?) that could back/forward port UI themes across various Windows versions? Are they still around?
Yes and it's a subscription based license now.. of course
good heavens - can any thing or any one escape the subscription madness
Yes, that would be glorious. Could be the XP UI too… have some more flexibility around themes.
Did you try it?
I can't immediately see why explorer.exe wouldn't run and give you a start menu
> and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
It won't compile.
Probably the 10 extra bits.
The extra 84 win have to go somewhere
Only two more to go for the LLM to hallucinate x64-86 into existence.
11 more and it will run on win95 again.
What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified.
Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other article seems to imply Windows 95 used UTF16 (or UCS2, but either way 16-bit chars) so I'm confused about porting code being a problem. Was it that the APIs in 95 were still kind of a halfway point?
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet".
By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented
That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.
>, UTF-8 predates Windows NT.
Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.
Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.
> public beta
Which, let's not forget, also meant an external ecosystem already developing software for it
UTF-8 was invented in 1992 and was first published in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 had its first public demo in 1991, was scheduled for release in 1992 and was released in 1993.
Technically UTF-8 was invented before the first Windows NT release, but they would have had to rework a nearly finished and already delayed OS
Also keep in mind that ISO’s official answer was UTF-1 not UTF-8, and UTF-8 wasn’t formally accepted as part of the Unicode and ISO standards until 1996. And early versions of UTF-8 still allowed the full 31 bit range of the original ISO 10646 repertoire, before it was limited to the 21 bit range of UTF-16. Also, a lot of early UTF-8 implementations were actually what we now call CESU-8, or had various other infelicities (such as accepting overlong encodings, nowadays commonly disabled as a security risk). So even in 1993, I’m not sure it was yet clear that UTF-8 was going to win.
Oh god, this again. One word: "History". No one thought we would need more than 16 bits (65k chars) to represent all the world's written languages. Then it happened. There must be no less than one thousand individually authored blog posts and technical articles on this matter. Win32, Java, and Qt all suffer from the same UTF-16 internal representation. There has been endless discussion on the matter over the last 10 years about how to change these frameworks to use UTF-8 internal representation. It is a crazy hard problem.
The tragic part is how brief the period of time was between “ascii and a mess of code pages” and the problem actually getting solved with Unicode 2.0 and UTF-8.
Unicode 1.0 was in 1991, UTF-8 happened a year later, and Unicode 2.0 (where more than 65,536 characters became “official”, and UTF-8 was the recommended choice) was in 1996.
That means if you were green-fielding a new bit of tech in 1991, you likely decided 16 bits per character was the correct approach. But in 1992 it started to become clear that maybe a variable with encoding (with 8 bits as the base character size) was on the horizon. And by 1996 it was clear that fixed 16-bit characters was a mistake.
But that 5-year window was an extremely critical time in computing history: Windows NT was invented, so was Java, JavaScript, and a bunch of other things. So, too late, huge swaths of what would become today’s technical landscape had set the problem in stone.
UNIXes only use the “right” technical choice because it was already too hard to move from ASCII to 16-bit characters… but laziness in moving off of ASCII ultimately paid off as it became clear that 16-bits per character was the wrong choice in the first place. But otherwise UNIX would have had the same fate.
For a while the brain dead utf32 encoding was popular in the Unix/Linux world.
Exactly: Long live "wchar_t".
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
You don’t need git to get something “as simple as a git merge” (Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3)
Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3), so three-way merges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(version_control)#Three-...) predate git by decades.
Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
Time started moving faster after smartphones began to steal our reflective moments.
I don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)
Probably a mix of this, and also that it feels like there have been many strikingly different milestones for Windows as a product since Win95, while git is not fundamentally different since 2006/07, or at least change has been far more gradual. Windows is so storied it feels older.
There’s been two main massive shifts that create before-and-after feelings in tech. One is going from “the computer is that super-typewriter that can send mail” to internet culture, and the second is going from online in pcs to always online in smartphones.
Win 95 feels from era1, xp and git was already in era 2.
Once those two changes were done by 2010 though, there’s been no game changer, if anything we've regressed through shittyfication (we seem to have fewer social networks vs the original Facebook for example, as most of them turned single player feed consumption).
Maybe pre and post LLMs will feel like an era change in a decade as well?
Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
I wonder what percentage of people on HN have ever used subversion or cvs, let alone older systems.
I remember the days of NT4 and the guy that would lock a file, leave for the day and you couldn't check it out :D Good times!
Same year I deleted all our customer's websites by simply dragging the hosting folder somewhere into C:\programs or something by mistake... A double click + lag turned into a drag and drop! Whoops!
I was pale as a ghost as I asked for the zip drive.
We had to reboot the file server first, which we did a swift kick to the power button.
At least today we employ very secure mechanisms; like YAML rollouts of config, to keep things interesting.
CVS was released in 1990. Subversion was released in 2000.
Google still uses a clone of Perforce internally (and various wrappers of it). Perforce was released in 1995.
Perforce is standard in gamedev currently. As a programmer first and foremost, I prefer git but I've certainly come to appreciate the advantages of Perforce and it's an overall better fit for (bigger) game projects.
Does it do better handling of larger files, like game assets?
Yes, Perforce handles large files, and large folders of files, very well. It's quite efficient with deltas in binary files. It's also very useful that Perforce expects clients to check out only a part of the depot. There are folders with raw assets like uncompressed sound, layered graphics and all that, I don't check out any of that, I only check out the necessary in-engine assets.
For code, I prefer git as I said, but in a game's depot most files are not code, and Perforce is built around handling those other assets well.
Yes. And other game development tools integrate Perforce better than Git. File level security is another advantage.
I'm still using subversion as it servers solo developer needs perfectly.
Only if you don't branch often. The way I code, I branch for every feature or bugfix. Even on my personal projects.
I remember moving from SCCS to RCS because it was considered superior.
I work on a project that we started in CVS, then moved to Perforce, and now on git. With full, intact history.
sccs, I was using it as late as the 90s.
But the percentage is probably small, yes.
Sun used SCCS until they moved to Mercurial in the early 2000s.
Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
> Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though.
It just really highlights how much better BitKeeper and then Git's design was compared to what came before. You then pile on being free/OSS, and being "proven" by an extremely large, well known, and successful project on top, and you have yourself explosive growth.
There are developers around these days who never had the displeasure of using the pre-Git source control offerings; it was rough.
Funnily enough the Linux Kernel still use patches (and of course Git has helpers to create and import patches)
Don’t they get emailed patch from git? Sorry if I’m super ignorant here, it’s interesting to me if they do!
You can use `git format-patch` to export a range of commits from your local git tree as a set of patches. You can then use `git send-email` to send that patch set out to the appropriate mailing list and maintainers (or just do it in one step, send-email accepts a similar commit range instead of patch files). It talks directly to an SMTP server you have configured in your `.gitconfig` and sends out e-mail.
Of course, `git send-email` has a plethora of options, e.g. you'd typically add a cover letter for a patch set.
Also, in the Linux kernel tree, there are some additional helper scripts that you might want to run first, like `checkpatch.pl` for some basic sanity checks and `get_maintainer.pl` that tells you the relevant maintainers for the code your patch set touches, so you can add them to `--cc`.
The patches are reviewed/discussed on the mailing list that you sent them to.
On the receiving side, as a maintainer, you'd use `git am` (apply mail) that can import the commits from a set of mbox files into your local git tree.
> Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though.
> ...and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
How are these ideas connected? The intent of git is that you work with patches.
For most people, git is that you work with pull requests, and already early on some bristled at the term “patches” which implied an obsolete way of working.
> For most people, git is that you work with pull requests
Unlike patches, pull requests aren't even a feature of git.
and even then, it's easy for merges to turn into chaos, git has no semantic awareness (no surprises here) and sometimes similar patterns will end up collapsed as a single change and conflict
As a comparison, CVS is from 1990, SVN from 2000 (and RCS from 82)
maybe merging patch files was a thing way before git?
> this manual process was largely automated
Priceless.
I would like to read the story of why the Windows 95 window title bar and buttons looks so much like the NeXT ones
As much as the tech industry loves to hate on Microsoft, it’s really quite amazing what they were able to do with fairly primitive tools operating on huge, complex code bases.
I prefer to believe they just merged the two branches in SourceSafe.
Microsoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.
Hmm. Not sure I agree. The initial CLR for .net was in vss. Maybe it wasn’t important, but bonus points if you know why.
No definitely not true. It was in Source Depot if not SLM.
This I can believe.
Did SourceSafe even have a proper merge?
Personally, I enjoyed MS source safe and exclusive file locking.
I loved SourceSafe for the disappearing files, and the usual "John locked the file and he went on holidays."
Well that was just bad manners and you could force unlock.
Perforce also did exclusive file locking (and I believe Microsoft ended up using a customized Perforce internally at some point).
sd was a light customization of p4
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
Amazingly, explorer.exe still freezes up to this very day. Bravo, Microsoft. Never change.
@dang: It would be nice if we can add an exception to these URLs. Currently, the domain hint only says: "microsoft.com". It would be better if it said: "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" or "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". I think we did something similar with forbes.com to illuminate when it was a blog (which are frequently low quality), instead of the official media website.
Ok, that should be done now. I'm not happy about how much screen space "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" takes up, so I might look into rewriting these to "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". On the other hand, that's arguably a bit misleading too.
It says devblogs.microsoft.com for me
Work in progress :)
Edit: should be done now
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