Farewell to one of the great ones

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Minh — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:07:00 GMT

Larry,
This is great stuff. I'm a history buff and have been enjoying your stories immensely. I love the behind-the-scene technical stuff & how things get done. You NEED to write a book!

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Kingsley Tagbo — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:20:00 GMT

Great minds working for a great company.

What a wonder, what a blog!

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Gabe — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:29:00 GMT

As Minh said, I have been enjoying your stories immensely. Please do not stop blogging.

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

John Topley — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:56:00 GMT

Wow, I love reading stuff like this! I first came across Weiss/Reynolds/Lipe and Sargent whilst reading Andrew Schulman's fascinating "Unauthorised Windows 95" in about 1994. That book did some serious spelunking in the Windows 3.x/9.x architecture and revealed that the VMM was the true heart of Windows and not the Kernel, USER and GDI DLLs that most programmers were familiar with.

It also had lots of fascinating historical asides, including the revelation that Windows was largely based on VM research done by IBM Research in 1972 and also how achieving the Windows breakthrough you describe felt like George Gamow figuring out how sunshine works!

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Michael Ruck — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 21:04:00 GMT

Count one more vote on a book. I would by at least one copy of it. These stories are the best I've read from Microsoft so far and makes me wonder even more what it's like to work there.

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Mat Hall — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 21:27:00 GMT

A book would be cool; if you and Raymond (and other interesting types) could get together and collaborate it'd be even better. A friend of mine has some giant coffee-table book about the history of MS, and it's fascinating. A bit light on detail and heavy on pictures (especially of people with suspicious 70s haircuts) but interesting none the less; however it could have done with more of the writing being done by the people who were involved in the things it talks about rather than by Joe Q Random...

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Paul Scott — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 21:28:00 GMT

Wow, thanks so much for this great read.

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Bill Rockenbeck — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:12:00 GMT

David Weise interviewed me at MIT back in '89 and so was responsible for making me, personally, a fortune, as well. :-)

Great blog, Larry. I'd buy the book.

re: Fairwell to one of the great ones

Mat Hall — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:21:00 GMT

(Oh, and in a pedantic vein, it's FAREwell...)

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

ar — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 02:22:00 GMT

(in an also pedantic vein, it's BonNE Chance ;)

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Thomas — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:19:00 GMT

Please write a book :-), no serious you have to write a book. All those stories are just to fascinating.

btw great blog Larry.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Ben Bryant — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:20:00 GMT

The fact that you happened to wander over there about that time, and still remember it, is really wonderful. As a programmer I really understand the dynamics of these stories from experiences that, of course, have less impact on the history of the world... You are really do well at chronicling some of these incredible moments including your own particular experiences in relation to them. I wonder if Aaron remembers what he might have showed you at that time...

Tipping Points

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:24:00 GMT

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Greg Dean — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:25:00 GMT

I Vote Book. What would it take Larry?

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Tim P — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 02:55:00 GMT

I think a collaborative book by yourself, Raymond Chen, and some of the other seasoned MS developers about the early days of DOS through Windows 95 would make a fantastic piece of literature.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Robert — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:45:00 GMT

From the title of the article I thought he died! At least there was a happy ending when I read the article.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Bob — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:45:00 GMT

You can't call people "Engineers" unless they have an engineering degree. Hasn't the EE Association of America already gone through this with MS

Don't write a book

mslover — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:02:00 GMT

Please don't ever write a book about MS. There is no need for yet another book to glorify working for the devil from redmont. Even tsunamis begin as a little tremor on the seafloor, but that does not make then cute or likeable in any way.

--
MicroSoft: Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in disguise, first against the wall when the revolution comes!

OK so he's clever but ...

David — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:04:00 GMT

A polished turd is still just a polished turd. Windows 3.0 was utterly awful. I wish this guy had worked on Linux perhaps we'd have had a great operating system much sooner.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:17:00 GMT

Windows 3.0 was a nightmare. Stop reminding me of its greatness.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Autoversicherung — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:22:00 GMT

WOW! Just great!

So RMS did dirty Blackjack things? :)

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

-df- — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:24:00 GMT

I thought his name sounded familiar - I was at the Windows 3.0 launch in Atlanta Comdex, anyone else? I knew it would change everything.

And check this out from the good old himem.sys source code that put an end to the expensive expanded memory cards and finally let us use extended memory - check out the last name!

;*****************************************************************************
;* HIMEM.ASM - Chip Anderson
;* Sample Extended Memory Specification Driver -
;* Copyright 1988, Microsoft Corporation
;*
;*The HMA was originally envisioned by Ralph Lipe.
;*Original XMS spec designed by Aaron Reynolds, Chip Anderson, and
;*Tony Gosling. Additional spec suggestions by Phil Barrett and David
;*Weise of Microsoft
;*****************************************************************************

David Weise

Not Even Wrong — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:31:00 GMT

Slashdot today has something pointing to Larry Osterman's weblog where he tells the story of my ex-roommate David Weise's career, much of which has been spent at Microsoft. David is generally credited with almost single-handedly making Windows a viable product,...

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Peter Woit — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 16:32:00 GMT

For some minor corrections, see my weblog entry

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/archives/000149.html

Fascinating Read on Windows History

SlickThought.Net — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:58:00 GMT

I've worked for Microsoft almost 9 years and have never heard this story. Larry Osterman posts a gr

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Jim K. — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:23:00 GMT

If I remember the history correctly, this protected mode feat was even more impressive because there was a bug in Intel's 80286 chip that made it nearly impossible to switch back to Normal mode once you were in Protected mode. Weise had to figure out a way to code around the bug, because there were already millions of IBM AT PCs in use.

Wow!

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Anonymous Coward — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:07:00 GMT

This part of the story amused me:

"When David got in the next day (at around 8AM), he saw that his machine had crashed..."

Windows: crashing from day one and still crashing today.

Absolutely marvellous

Nige — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:08:00 GMT

Forget the people slagging off Windows 3.0. They obviously were not around at the time that it came out and blew everything else on the PC out of the water. It immediately made OS/2 look like a very dead duck.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

RichB — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:40:00 GMT

This story is also in "Barbarians led by Bill Gates", Edstrom & Eller.

Chapter 6 of that book informs us that SST stands for Scroll Screen Tracer and that Murray Sargent was a contractor at Microsoft and that Sargent turned down 25,000 stock options because he only wanted to spend the summer at Microsoft...(this was 1987).

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Peter Woit — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:48:00 GMT

Hate to correct a correction to a minor point, but it's me (Peter Woit) not Danny Lunsford, whose weblog had an entry about this. I was David's roommate in Princeton.
At one point David, Chuck Whitmer and I shared an apartment, another year Nathan Myhrvold and I were roommates.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Larry (Questor) — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:02:00 GMT

Thanks for the memories. I was in IBM's labs when OS/2 1.1 was out and still recall (fondly, ironically enough) the public debates Gordon Letwin and I had on the Internet over which system was better.

Not having been privy to the celebrating that occurred when this feat was accomplished, the story in this entry is particularly nice to read. I still remember when IBM's Boca Raton labs came up with a way to run Windows applications in standard (i.e. protected) mode under OS/2. From the ensuing bruhaha, you'd have thought the world was ending so I can only imagine what Redmond must've been like.

Oh, and Larry, if you ever want to right a book I'd like to contribute. I have some interesting stories to tell from deep within the lab I had at T.J. Watson. :P

great

Umapathy — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:10:00 GMT

Please write a book. I will buy 10 copies to present to my friends.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Jay — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:22:00 GMT

It's Jim Gray, not Grey.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Neal Sidhwaney (nealsid) — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:23:00 GMT

What about the fact that IBM *DID* have an operating system that they shifted priorities from when deciding to back Linux...i.e. AIX?

-Neal

QuarterDeck?

Mike Jones — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 03:47:00 GMT

Yes, very impressive, however didn't QuarterDeck and 386 MAXX already do the same thing? These were similar products, very impressive software, which were quite popular, obviously until Microsoft had this functionality in the Windows 3.0 it seems.

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Boris — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 06:18:00 GMT

so are there gonna be any more operating versions of windows coming out or is apple going 2 make a better operaing system then windows xp professional

re: Farewell to one of the great ones

Shahmir Noorani — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 03:43:00 GMT

Great. Very impressive. I remember my first 486 (or was it older?) machine running windows 3.0 and playing Prince of Persia.

Separated at birth?

Kevin Dente's PuppiesAndIceCreamBlog — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:59:00 GMT

Separated at birth?

Kevin Dente's PuppiesAndIceCreamBlog — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:17:00 GMT

David Weise leaves

Geekfishing Blog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 05:47:00 GMT

Farewell to one of the great ones. I must be getting old, I remember ralph, aaron, david and all those...

Unicast » A flop

Unicast » A flop — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:22:00 GMT

PingBack from http://unicast.org/blog/1456

landley: Computer History Stuff...

landley: Computer History Stuff... — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:07:00 GMT

PingBack from http://www.livejournal.com/users/landley/14310.html

Computer History Stuff... by landley () | LjSEEK.COM

Computer History Stuff... by landley () | LjSEEK.COM — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:07:03 GMT

PingBack from http://www.ljseek.com/computer-history-stuff_53901734.html

Saving Windows from the OS/2 Bulldozer

Murray Sargent: Math in Office — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:01:41 GMT

In my blog description, I promised to write occasionally about the early Windows days. So here's a post

[news] Proximo IE 7. La beta este mismo verano. | hilpers

[news] Proximo IE 7. La beta este mismo verano. | hilpers — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:43:24 GMT

PingBack from http://www.hilpers-esp.com/335661-news-proximo-ie-7-la

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | Quick Diets

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | Quick Diets — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:33:15 GMT

PingBack from http://quickdietsite.info/story.php?id=11139

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | debt solutions

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | debt solutions — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:00:07 GMT

PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=7006

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | unemployment office

Larry Osterman s WebLog Farewell to one of the great ones | unemployment office — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:04:49 GMT

PingBack from http://unemploymentofficeresource.info/story.php?id=11362