It's the hardware, stupid!

re: It's the hardware, stupid!

mschaef — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:21:24 GMT

What kind of e-mail did the Windows 1.0 team use? I'm imagining a DOS terminal program (the original MS Access, perhaps?) and a serial link to a PDP-something running e-mail software.

"So sometimes, it IS the hardware."

Yeah, just ask an embedded software developer. :-)

re: It's the hardware, stupid!

J Osako — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 17:58:10 GMT

It is all too easy to forget that a computer system is a *system*, and that the many parts of it - hardware and software - are interdependent.

That having been said, it has to be added that bad memory cards - and bad individual chips - were a widespread problem in the XT/AT days, one which really wasn't solved until the advent of SIMMs. Even today bad memory is more common than is usually realized, especially since it often is intermittent and can have symptoms that seem unrelated to memory. Video memory problems can be particularly hard to track down.

Regarding Michael Schaeffer's comment, I've been given to understand that most MS development prior to about 1989 was done in a XENIX environment, largely because it supported e-mail, FTP, source control, etc. better than the MS-DOS software of the time. XENIX was still a large part of Microsoft's long-term business strategy at the time.

re: It's the hardware, stupid!

LarryOsterman — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:51:20 GMT

J Osako's right: MS development (at least OS development) in those days was done on Xenix machines.

Most people had an H19 terminal in their office that they used for email etc, and a serial line to download from the mainframes.

re: It's the hardware, stupid!

Norman Diamond — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 02:49:49 GMT

There was a time when Microsoft Basic compiler development was done on a VAX. At around that time DEC had to replace a bunch of defective third-party memory modules that were installed by value subtracted resellers because VAXes had DEC's name on them.

I do wish that parity (or maybe better ECC such as IBM had 35 years ago) would still be commonly used in RAM as it is just about everywhere else in PCs. Then we'd be able to infer with a rather high accuracy whether a problem was really in RAM or in software.

re: It's the hardware, stupid!

Jason Geffner — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:58:46 GMT

Seems like it's not much better today...

"Why untested DRAMs are getting into more and more products", 4/18/05: http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/194256