Invisible wrote:
> But The Real WTF(tm) is
> - ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
> 
> As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to present 
> their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O

I would venture to say that they probably didn't know if the Internet 
was going to be important or not, and went with the cheapest hook-up 
available.  While it may seem stupid for someone in a Western business 
concern not to have known, in 1998, that the Internet was definitely 
going to be important, any observer of the American automobile industry 
will aver that management can be guilty of graver stupidities than that.

Regards,
John

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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:16:03 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:

>Most systems that I have seen either charge you X per minute you're 
>online, X per unit of data downloaded/uploaded, or X per month. AOL are 
>charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per 
>minute as well.

That was round about the time I joined AOL (I used AOL 3). The reason
was you could pick a payment plan that gave you free access numbers
and no download limit with dialup.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:24:03 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:


>Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an 
>application program that runs under MS-DOS. If you write Windows, you go 
>back to DOS. When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs 
>Windows. And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement 
>capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in 
>an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
>

You probably don't remember what it was like to run DOS in the 80's.
Batch files ruled :) At work we had a menu application that ran the
apps that were commonly used or you could go into DOS and run them
from the command line.. 

I had an Amstrad PC-1512 which ran under DR DOS that you could run GEM
(Graphical Environment Manager).

>IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the 
>top of MS-DOS, and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real* 
>OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware 
>abstraction, etc.

True.

>Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
>and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
>looking for one that actually functioned?

Very true :)

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> [Jesus, and I don't even have a sound card...]

  Then you missed most of it.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an 
> application program that runs under MS-DOS.

  Don't you mean "over"? If you say "under" you are effectively saying
that the underlying system was Windows 3.11, and you ran DOS on top of
it. Clearly you meant the other way around: The underlying system was DOS,
and Windows ran on top of it.

> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.

  What does that even mean?

> When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs 
> Windows.

  Actually, especially in the early days of Windows 3, it was quite
common for systems to boot to DOS, period. When you wanted to start
windows you wrote "win". Only few people added that "win" to the end
of their autoexec.bat. (I assume this was more common at workplaces
where Windows3 was used for everything.)

> And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement 
> capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in 
> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]

  But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
but it's still multitasking.

> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the 
> top of MS-DOS

  That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
processes those two files at startup".

  Some people claimed that Win9x had the exact same system as DOS+Win3
with the exception that it boots directly to Windows without ever starting
command.com. Others claimed that the process was just part of the normal
startup of Win9x, and there was no DOS involved per se. (When you chose
the "boot to DOS" option, the only difference between a normal boot is
that at some point the booting process branches to the DOS side.)

  But Win9x was indeed somewhat of a hybrid at best.

> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real* 
> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware 
> abstraction, etc.

  "Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?

  As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
in Windows.

  And as I said, Windows 3 already had multitasking.

> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
> looking for one that actually functioned?

  Are you confusing it with trying to optimize the drivers so that most
of them would be loaded in himem?

> Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells" 
> where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast 
> yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!

  Was that a problem with the OS or one with the hardware? Word was a
rather big program even back then.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> AOL are 
> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per 
> minute as well.

  Well, it was dialup. What do you expect?

  (Heck, even *today* some people still use dialup and pay per minute.
Naturally this is becoming rarer and rarer, as with ADSL you get a
connection which is a thousand times faster at a fraction of the cost.)

> >   Actually Windows 3.1 could run in much less, and Win95 could run with
> > 4 MB (I have direct experience of this).

> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just 
> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)

  Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
probably required more than those 4 MB.

> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes 
> you feel sad...

  Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Stephen wrote:

> You probably don't remember what it was like to run DOS in the 80's.
> Batch files ruled :)

Oh, I think I do actually... Certainly even into the 90's, even though 
Windows was around, batch files still ruled. That or QBASIC.

[Where I work, we have some analytical software that was written 
in-house. It's written in QBASIC. For legal reasons I am required to 
keep it in working order. I AM NOT JOKING. Mercifully, since it's 
QBASIC, there isn't actually a lot that can really go wrong - it's 
blissfully unaware of most of its surroundings. But suffice it to say 
that printing to a networked laser printer is... interesting?]

And let us not forget how much scripting I did in AmigaDOS. Unlike 
MS-DOS, this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after 
Unix, not to mention a small cottage industry of scriptable GUI components.

Under AmigaDOS, "more" was a GUI program! A minimal one, granted - but 
that's why everybody used "PPmore". PP = PowerPacker, referring to this 
program's ability to natively open PP files without having to invoke PP 
to unpack them first. But everybody used it for its wildly superiod GUI...

That's one thing I liked about the Amiga. So long as your LIBS: folder 
contained a copy of powerpacker.library, every program in the system 
that did anything involving PP files would work fine. I gather that both 
Unix and Windoze are supposed to work the same way... but you don't get 
to see it in practice.

Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two 
floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so that 
it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files were on 
the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could still find all 
of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it sounds, but it worked 
magnificantly.

[Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux 
distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how 
Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented 
anywhere........]

>> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
>> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
>> looking for one that actually functioned?
> 
> Very true :)

Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS 
powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never 
tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> But The Real WTF(tm) is
>> - ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
>>
>> As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to 
>> present their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O
> 
> I would venture to say that they probably didn't know if the Internet 
> was going to be important or not, and went with the cheapest hook-up 
> available.  While it may seem stupid for someone in a Western business 
> concern not to have known, in 1998, that the Internet was definitely 
> going to be important, any observer of the American automobile industry 
> will aver that management can be guilty of graver stupidities than that.

What perplexes me more is that a few months later, they hired a company 
to design and host a website for us - and we continued using AOL home 

on the design and hosting of a dedicated website, but not important 
enough to go with a real ISP?

Suddenly I'm understanding the vast profusion of dialup modems I threw 
away last week!

Of course, after that an "ISP" opened for business on the same business 
park as the guys I work for, and we went with them.

They were never terrifically reliable. I'd quite often have to walk 
across the lawn and knock on their door to ask why something or other 
wasn't working. (Typically we had no Internet access at all - which, 
back in those days, just meant we couldn't send or receive email.)

One day, I went over to ask why our connection was down, and discovered...

...that the entire building was empty. And by "empty", I mean there were 
no desks, no chairs, no filling cabinets, no plants, just a deserted 
building. (!!!) When I eventually obtained the keys to the building from 
site management, I discovered that some potential new tennants had been 
taking a look round and had unplugged the network hub that powers our 
building.

[The visitors understandably didn't realise that the equipment in this 
deserted building *does*, in fact, still need to be running. Hell, why 
would you think that though? You get a call from a business park 
inviting you to have a look round a vacant building, and find that some 
other company's critical infrastructure is run from that building... GO 
FIGURE!]

About a month *after* this, we got a letter from the ISP telling us that 
they don't do ISP work now; they just do consultancy. Gee, thank you SO 
MUCH for telling us!

When I had a look at their infrastructure [which, obviously, I'd never 
been allowed near before], I discovered that the wireless transmitter in 
our building connects to a similar one in their building. But whereas 
ours is mounted on the wall, theirs was inside a Tupperware box that 
someone had crudely gouged some holes into using a pair of scissors to 
allow the wires through.

(ARE YOU READING THIS?? We paid several thousand pounds per year for 
THIS level of professionalism!)

The box was sitting in the loft space, and the power and network cables 
trail out under a moved ceiling tile. The power cord was at this point 
holding an extension cord off the ground. The network cable vanished 
into a tangle of Cat5 around two 3com 48-port switches, went through a 
Sonicwall firewall, and then vanished into an underground fiber optic 
link to the switch room in the main park reception area.

When you get to the main switch room, you discover something a bit more 
professional-looking. And it turns out our "ISP" was actually just 
leasing an Internet pipe from a company called Network-I. So we became a 
direct customer of Network-I, to keep our existing system working.

(It appears they're still going:  http://www.network-i.net/  )

Anyway, I don't know what Network-I actually "do". Certainly they seemed 
to be far more professional than the clowns who had just deserted us. 
But they were giving us 0.5 Mbit/sec of bandwidth for quite a steep 

brand new fiber link.

BT told us they could install a new link for nothing, and it would be 
direct to our building (rather than going through the switch room and 
then through our old ISP's deserted building). They told us the link 
could be active in 21 days [which seemed a little surprising considering 
it involves digging up roads].

We signed up. Nothing happened for a while. You see, "BT" is not 
*actually* BT any more. The people we spoke to were "BT local business" 
- which is actually "Crystal Communications", a nobody company that won 
the right to put "BT" on their vans. They operate on behalf of BT, but 
they're a seperate, unrelated company. In particular, they have nothing 
to do with the actual service. They're just salesmen.

After many days of frantic calling, I eventually managed to get hold of 
the *real* people - the ones who actually know about laying cables and 
assigning IP addresses and so forth. Actual network engineers. Things 
went much better after that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an 
>> application program that runs under MS-DOS.
> 
>   Don't you mean "over"?

Well, I suppose you could rephase it that way. Either way, Windows 3.11 
was no "operating system". It was an MS-DOS application program.

>> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.
> 
>   What does that even mean?

I meant to write "quit Windows".

>> When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs 
>> Windows.
> 
>   Actually, especially in the early days of Windows 3, it was quite
> common for systems to boot to DOS, period. When you wanted to start
> windows you wrote "win". Only few people added that "win" to the end
> of their autoexec.bat. (I assume this was more common at workplaces
> where Windows3 was used for everything.)

Yeah, that's true enough - especially since after you change some 
settings, you can never quite be sure if MS-DOS let alone Windows will 
still work. Plus you need to see all those error messages scroll past as 
you boot the machine, so you if everything went OK - and if not, which 
parts failed.

[I recall it used to be a Big Deal whether "extended memory" got enabled 
or not. I knew a guy who even had a whole book devoted to "taking your 
PC beyong 640KB". I don't know what the difference between "conventional 
memory" and "extended memory" is or was, but this "problem" seems to 
have entirely gone away now...]

>> And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement 
>> capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in 
>> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
> 
>   But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
> but it's still multitasking.

AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of 
them can actually "do" anything at a time, but you can have several 
applications "started". (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program 
that prints out numbers, and then switching to another window and seeing 
the first program stop printing until you switch back.)

>> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the 
>> top of MS-DOS
> 
>   That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
> run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
> whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
> processes those two files at startup".

Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely 
switch between the two...

>> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real* 
>> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware 
>> abstraction, etc.
> 
>   "Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
> alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?

...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at 
all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The 
answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to 
reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".

>   As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
> the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
> already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
> Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
> in Windows.

Does Win9x run in protected mode? [This isn't rhetorical - I can't 
actually remember.]

Certainly WinNT introduced security. Win9x can be made to show a login 
prompt, but you can just cancel it if you don't feel like logging in. 
You then have unlimited access to every file on the local machine.

>> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
>> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
>> looking for one that actually functioned?
> 
>   Are you confusing it with trying to optimize the drivers so that most
> of them would be loaded in himem?

IIRC, even something as trivial as getting a CD-ROM drive to work 
[assuming you were rich enough to afford one] used to be quite 
challengine. I can remember stumbling across cyclic load-dependency 
chains before now.

>> Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells" 
>> where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast 
>> yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!
> 
>   Was that a problem with the OS or one with the hardware? Word was a
> rather big program even back then.

I have little personal experience, but I recall that back in the old 
days, getting PC software to work tended to be *very* difficult. (Most 
especially games, but any large application such as Word tended to be 
tricky to set up.)

Maybe it was because the hardware wasn't up to much. Maybe it was 
because MS-DOS is so primitive. I'm not really sure...

Certainly on the Amiga scene, "installing" a program usually meant 
putting the floppy into the drive and clicking an icon. A tiny few 
programs required you to actually copy a font file to your system disk 
or something, and usually had extensive and meticulous instructions 
explaining exactly how to do this, in language even a 5 year old could 
follow. Either that or the application got ignored in favour of 
better-documented alternative apps...

[It was only very late into the party that Amiga programs started to 
have "installers", and these were usually just DOS scripts that perform 
some minimal checks before copying a few files. Uninstallers appeared 
even later. Generally this kind of thing just wasn't necessary, because 
installation was so simple...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> AOL are 
>> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per 
>> minute as well.
> 
>   Well, it was dialup. What do you expect?

Even back then, may ISPs offered per-minute charges OR flat-rate 
charges. AOL are charging you both ways at the same time.

>   (Heck, even *today* some people still use dialup and pay per minute.
> Naturally this is becoming rarer and rarer, as with ADSL you get a
> connection which is a thousand times faster at a fraction of the cost.)

A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec 
broadband. ;-)

But up to a hundred times faster? Sure.

>> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just 
>> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
> 
>   Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
> probably required more than those 4 MB.

Well, I guess if you want to cache page layout, and you have a page 
that's moderately large, even on plain text you could eat hundreds of KB 
quite fast. You wouldn't have to sprinkle many image files in to exceed 
4 MB - even if we assume the software is actually efficient.

>> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes 
>> you feel sad...
> 
>   Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
> with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P

Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging. [The 
largest file I've ever downloaded was 4GB, and that took 3 days. I think 
it was Star Wreck - damn amusing, BTW!]

But yes, not so long ago, writing a program that "achieves realtime MP3 
decoding" was seen as a major achievement, and *encoding* could take 
days. I was shocked to discover the other day that my copy of WinAmp is 
using about 0.25% CPU to decode a Vorbis file in realtime. [Recall that 
Vorbis is more CPU-intensive than MP3.]

I find it staggering how my Amiga took over 2 *hours* to render 
SKYVASE.POV (uh, why?), yet PCs toay can do it in mere seconds. At a 
much higher resolution. With AA.

And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain 
applications to start up. WTF?

[Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given 
that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that 
one go.]

PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a 
handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no 
reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why 
is it so slow?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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