<story><title>What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider&apos;s Retrospective</title><url>https://blog.usejournal.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-an-insiders-retrospective-f713ee77c239</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deaddodo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not quite sure how to interpret your last comment. You prefer the IE box model? Or you&amp;#x27;re saying they did it right from the get go? Because quirks mode &lt;i&gt;was&lt;/i&gt; abandoned and everyone uses the Moz&amp;#x2F;W3C model now.&lt;p&gt;A better example would be file line endings, where Microsoft did get it right (\r\n) and all the other OS&amp;#x27;s screwed up using just \r or \n.</text></item><item><author>johnchristopher</author><text>&amp;gt; Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.&lt;p&gt;Still, Vista was a disaster.&lt;p&gt;I remember a conversation I had with a MS engineer at that time:&lt;p&gt;- Vista is like, the foundations for the good things to come. If you want a solid house, you dig solid foundations.&lt;p&gt;- I am buying a house, not just pillars in the ground.&lt;p&gt;(It was the same with the w3c specs: &amp;quot;maybe mozilla and opera are the ones misreading the box model spec and IE has it right&amp;quot;, me &amp;quot;ms is on the board...&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>tjoff</author><text>Vista was amazing.&lt;p&gt;I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation.&lt;p&gt;1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since).&lt;p&gt;Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the &lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt; opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don&amp;#x27;t count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help.&lt;p&gt;2. Pre-fetch&amp;#x2F;super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc.&lt;p&gt;After enough time this wasn&amp;#x27;t a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot.&lt;p&gt;Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Stratoscope</author><text>Interesting that you find \r\n to be &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; and the others &amp;quot;screwed up&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m curious about the reasons for that.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem is that each OS went its own way (Mac started with \r but of course uses \n now). If they all had the same line ending all along, whatever it was, no one would think much about it.&lt;p&gt;\r\n has the obvious disadvantage of being twice the size, along with making it possible to land &lt;i&gt;in the middle&lt;/i&gt; of a line ending instead of before or after one.&lt;p&gt;Of course one advantage would be if you&amp;#x27;re controlling physical equipment where carriage return and line feed are independent of each other. I learned to program in 1968 on a Teletype ASR33 where CR and LF were literal commands to return the carriage to column 1 and advance the paper. You had to use both because they did two different things. Or on occasion you might use CR by itself to overprint a line. LF by itself was pretty rare, but would do what you expect if you used it: advance the paper without moving the print carriage.&lt;p&gt;CR LF was fine if you were typing interactively - in fact you just had to hit the CR key and the remote system would provide the LF. But usually we would punch our programs on paper tape, dial in, run the tape through and get the printout, and hang up right away. At $30&amp;#x2F;hour in 1968 dollars, this saved a lot of money. And of course you would run your tape through locally to print out and proofread your program before testing it online.&lt;p&gt;To be able to print a tape locally, you needed both CR and LF, but even that wasn&amp;#x27;t quite adequate. You really wanted to allow a little extra time for the machinery to settle, so the standard line ending we punched on a tape was CR LF RUBOUT.&lt;p&gt;RUBOUT was a character that punched out all the holes in a row of the paper tape. It was ignored by convention, so you could erase a typing error when punching a tape by pushing the backspace button on the tape punch and hitting the RUBOUT key.&lt;p&gt;Because it was ignored, RUBOUT was also useful as a &amp;quot;delay&amp;quot; character in the newline sequence. So I guess I&amp;#x27;ll never get over the feeling that the One True Line Ending is: \r\n\x7F&lt;p&gt;(Nah, I&amp;#x27;m happy with \n, but it makes a good story.)</text></comment>
<story><title>What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider&apos;s Retrospective</title><url>https://blog.usejournal.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-an-insiders-retrospective-f713ee77c239</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deaddodo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not quite sure how to interpret your last comment. You prefer the IE box model? Or you&amp;#x27;re saying they did it right from the get go? Because quirks mode &lt;i&gt;was&lt;/i&gt; abandoned and everyone uses the Moz&amp;#x2F;W3C model now.&lt;p&gt;A better example would be file line endings, where Microsoft did get it right (\r\n) and all the other OS&amp;#x27;s screwed up using just \r or \n.</text></item><item><author>johnchristopher</author><text>&amp;gt; Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.&lt;p&gt;Still, Vista was a disaster.&lt;p&gt;I remember a conversation I had with a MS engineer at that time:&lt;p&gt;- Vista is like, the foundations for the good things to come. If you want a solid house, you dig solid foundations.&lt;p&gt;- I am buying a house, not just pillars in the ground.&lt;p&gt;(It was the same with the w3c specs: &amp;quot;maybe mozilla and opera are the ones misreading the box model spec and IE has it right&amp;quot;, me &amp;quot;ms is on the board...&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>tjoff</author><text>Vista was amazing.&lt;p&gt;I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation.&lt;p&gt;1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since).&lt;p&gt;Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the &lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt; opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don&amp;#x27;t count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help.&lt;p&gt;2. Pre-fetch&amp;#x2F;super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc.&lt;p&gt;After enough time this wasn&amp;#x27;t a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot.&lt;p&gt;Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niftich</author><text>The W3C box model became standard and IE was criticized for its quirky noncompliant behavior [1], but then many years later &amp;#x27;box-sizing: border-box&amp;#x27; was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks [2][3]; it&amp;#x27;s funny how things change.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Internet_Explorer_box_model_bu...&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;Web&amp;#x2F;CSS&amp;#x2F;box-sizing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;Web&amp;#x2F;CSS&amp;#x2F;box-sizing&lt;/a&gt; [3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;css-tricks.com&amp;#x2F;international-box-sizing-awareness-day&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;css-tricks.com&amp;#x2F;international-box-sizing-awareness-da...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>