Re: WIN genealogy

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from flash  on Sat, 17 Dec 2005 20:25:54
+0100


> I gather from forum notes that getting the display right
> is somewhat tricky under XP.

Actually it's no different than Win2K, and it isn't tricky either. It's just
that most old 9x users migrated (because they bought new boxes) directly to XP,
after the 9x product line was abandoned and everything was funneled toward XP
(Home and Pro being M$'s clever strategy to get you to buy XP twice, first Home
because you're a "light" user or because that's what where manufacturer is
getting the best M$ discounts, then Pro after you realize how underpowered &
uncontrolled Home is). So they never experienced earlier versions of NT (when
Win2K was marketed, 98SE was still alive, and there was all this blah blah blah
about 9x supporting more devices etc etc, total bunk).

The problem with the screen is simply that NT's default behavior isn't the same
as the 9x or DOS behavior. You can easily change it to whatever you want, and
we've been over this issue dozens of times -- many many posts at XySearch. But
users are lazy: ask (waste somebody else's time) first, struggle later.

NT1.x = OS/2
NT2.x = OS/2 (IBM only)
NT3.x = NT3.x
NT4  = NT4
NT5.0 = Win2K
NT5.1 = WinXP
NT5.2 = Server/.NET/2003
NT6 (supposedly) = Longhorn
Win3.x and 9x = DOS GUI

Longhorn is going to be a mess. It's not that Windows doesn't need rewriting,
because it is does. Supposedly this is a ground-up rewrite, but they keep
scaling back on their ambitions, which means they're borrowing modules from NT5
(not good!). The problem, rather, is that it takes a good 5-10 years to shake
the bugs out. So I suspect that prudent users will be stuck with XP for a long
time. It's no accident that Win2K and OS/2 Fixpack 13, the first truly mature
and debugged versions of their respective lineages, each took 11 years to
achieve.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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