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Microsoft History (RSS)

Stuff that happened long ago.

The story behind the mysterious “Ding” in Windows Vista.

I just ran into this fairly old post on Channel 9.  mstefan reported that his applications played a “Ding” noise when selecting an item in a listview (or tree) control.   It turns out that I’d had the problem independently reported to me by Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 5:29 PM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments

Digging into the history bin (AKA: Microsoft Developer says that Windows is useless)

As I was writing my “25 years of Larry’s history at Microsoft in 1 year chunks” blog posts, I spent a fair amount of time digging through my email archives (trying to figure out exactly what happened at what time).  During this, I ran into a link Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 01, 2009 11:49 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

24 years ago today (1985)

Way back in 1985 I was busy working on MS-DOS 4.0. MS-DOS 4.0 was a multitasking derivative of MS-DOS 2.0 (during 1985 we integrated the changes for MS-DOS 3.1 to MS-DOS 4.1). It’s important to remember the difference between MS-DOS and PC-DOS. PC-DOS Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:50 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

23 years ago today (1986)

23 years ago, I was working on finishing MS-DOS 4.0 and transitioning to work on MS-DOS 4.1.  We also moved from the original Northup campus to the brand new 4 building campus herein Redmond.  At the time the company mandated that we give up Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 12:56 PM by LarryOsterman | 8 Comments

20, 21 and 22 years ago (1987-1989)

Ok, at this point it should be blindingly obvious where this series is going :). In early 1987 I was still working on MS-DOS 4.1, a custom version of DOS for ICL in the UK. I also got married to my wonderful wife Valorie in January. We returned from our Read More...
Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 12:24 PM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments

Nineteen years ago today (1990)

In 1990 I joined the WIndows NT OS/2 team after working on Lan Manager for several years.  I was one of about 4-5 developers who moved from the Lan Manager team to join the much storied NT OS/2 developers.  I still have my copy of the NT OS/2 Read More...
Posted Friday, August 21, 2009 2:58 PM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Seventeen years ago today (1992)

I was working on the NT team working on the NT browser.  I was also preparing for my first major vacation in about 8 years – I was going to take 6 weeks off to visit Worldcon in Orlando, spend some time at Disneyworld, and visit my family on the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 19, 2009 5:00 PM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments

Sixteen years ago (1993)

Sixteen years ago, we were busy finishing up Windows NT 3.1.  On NT, I worked on the browser (network neighborhood) and the CIFS network filesystem, they both had their own challenges.  The NT browser (the computer browser service and bowser.sys Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 18, 2009 11:35 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen years ago (1994-1998)

Sorry, I was off on Friday so no post.  1994 was probably the most tumultuous year of my career at Microsoft.  In 1994, I left the NT team to join the “Tiger” team, a research project dedicated to building a media delivery infrastructure (in Read More...
Posted Monday, August 17, 2009 4:17 PM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Eleven years ago today (August 1999)

Eleven years ago, I was in the Exchange group, working on Exchange 2000 (same as 10 years ago :)).  The summer of 1999 was when Microsoft rolled out it’s “Comp2000” system which completely reworked the compensation system at Microsoft.  One Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 13, 2009 9:47 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Ten years ago today (August 1999)

In 1999, I was busy working on shipping Exchange 2000.  Most of the work I did on E2K was related to re-engineering the security subsystem for Exchange – the original security subsystem used a custom ACL model, for Exchange 2000, I converted that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 12, 2009 10:28 AM by LarryOsterman | 3 Comments

Nine years ago today (August 2000)

The biggest event on my plate in August was that I took taken delivery of a brand spanking new Itanium machine that was intended for 64bit Exchange development :).  We also shipped Exchange 2000 during mid 2000.  2000 was a time of some turmoil Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 11, 2009 2:37 PM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments

Six, Seven and Eight years ago today (August 2003, August 2002, August 2001)…

Between 2001 and 2002, I was working on the SCP project – SCP was a networking protocol that was designed for an embedded controller that was intended to be used for home automation.  It was a power line carrier based protocol and was designed for Read More...
Posted Monday, August 10, 2009 11:03 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Five years ago today (August 2004)

We were busy in the “Longhorn Reset” where we essentially threw away the work we’d previously done for Longhorn and restarted based on a Server 2003 based codebase.  We took the work we’d done for the Longhorn audio engine and reworked it to create Read More...
Posted Friday, August 07, 2009 11:03 AM by LarryOsterman | 2 Comments

Four years ago today (August 2005)

I had just finished the Beta3 coding for Windows Vista.  During that time I finished the per-app volume feature work and spent a bunch of time helping other groups finish up their initial coding.  Things were crazy busy, especially during the Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 06, 2009 11:50 AM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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