From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2005-12-17T13:26:10+09:00
Subject: Re: New to coding, lost as hell

On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 12:45:29PM +0900, Adam Sroka wrote:
> Devin Mullins wrote:
> >Adam Sroka wrote:
> >
> >>98 is perhaps the worst OS ever written (Actually, the "perhaps" is 
> >>not called for.)
> >
> >I beg to differ. Especially considering the hair I've pulled out 
> >trying to get my parents' ME system not to kick itself in the groin.
> >
> >Devin
> >(Not to put lightly the amount of enjoyment that working in an 
> >unsupported, dysfunctional operating system gives them.)
> Wasn't ME essentially just an upgrade to 98? 2000 was the an incremental 
> improvement on the NT kernel, and ME was 98 repackaged. It wasn't until 
> XP that the full product line moved to the NT codebase.

In short:
Microsoft wanted to move everything to an NT base.  Windows 2000
Professional was supposed to be the next step for upgrade from both
Windows NT Workstation and Windows 98.  Microsoft got really stupid
(moreso than usual) about how they handled the upgrade path, though, and
there were a number of accessibility issues that a business could
tolerate, but a home user couldn't, such as the extremely limited
hardware compatibility list for Win2k (which largely arose because of
the ridiculous hoops MS was making hardware vendors jump through to get
API specs for Win2k and the fact that Microsoft put a pretty strict
time-limit on submissions for inclusion in the plug-and-play capability
of the OS.  There were other problems as well, such as the unnecessarily
(for an end-user) complex user accounts management, and so on.

Win2k was turning out to be a pretty tremendous flop on the home-front,
and Microsoft decided it had to do something quickly to
recapture/maintain its strangelhold on the end user market.  They
decided that A) in the long run they needed to rethink their unified OS
architecture (thus the beginning of the development of XP) and B) they
needed to do something quick, so that there was something new from MS
that people would buy to replace the aging Windows 98.

So, in the interim, they cobbled together Windows Millenium Edition,
which was essentially Windows 98 with a bunch of wacky widgets and
"web-enhanced" features/bugs piled on top in a sort of functional house
of cards.  Ultimately, XP became a compromise, since the NT codebase
alone wasn't going to prove very marketable (as demonstrated by the
Win2k failure): it became sort of a mishmash of the Win32/NT and Chicago
(basically, Win98) architectures.

Hm.  I get the impression this is sorta off-topic.  I'll drop it before
I get really carried away.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.