Extended thoughts Substack post anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-microsoft-windows-2x Topics covered: Did Microsoft copy the Macintosh with Windows 2x? IBM and the 386 Windows 2x bundle deals with OEM’s When did Compaq start working with Microsoft on Windows/386? Windows/386 Preemptive Multitasking Who All Worked on Windows 2x? Why was the 286 considered crippled?
MICROSOFT BECAME NUMBER ONE BECAUSE OF VERY HIGH MARHINS!!!! OFFICE 1997 SOLD FOR $550 IN STORES!!! DEALERS IN THE 1990'S PAID $60 PER COPY!!!!! ALL OF THE PROFIT ON A SALE CAME FROM SELLING MICROSOFT SOFTWARE!!! OTHER VENDORS HAD $15 OR $20 PROFITS(WASTE OF TIME). THEN IN 2000, MICROSOFT DECIDED TO PUT IT'S 50,000(SMALL DEALERS) OUT OF BUSINESS!!! MICROSOFT TOOK AWAY THE MARGINS AND DELL LOWERED THE COST OF ITS COMPUTERS. LOSS OF PROFIT MARGINS ON BOTH SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE FORCED 50,000 SMALL DEALERS OUT OF BUSINESS. MICROSOFT HAD DECIDED IT ONLY WANTED LARGE CUSTOMERS AND MFG. DELL, HP, IBM TO SELL ITS PRODUCTS!!!! THE STOCK PRICE WAS 29 IN 2000, THE STOCK PRICE DECLINES FOR 13 YEARS AFTER IT GOT RID OF ITS SMALL DEALERS!! IN 2013 THE STOCK RECOVERED BACK TO $29.
Popcorn deployed! BTW, see quite possibly the most enthusiastic tech demo _in history_ , of OS/2 2.1 by IBM's David Barnes: Google inexplicably won't allow me to include a link to YT video, but search for 1993 hal os/2, and skip ahead to 38:52
Popcorn deployed! WTFF! My reply was DELETED, where _bizarrely_ Google doesn't want you to see EPIC OS 2 tech demo (search for 1993 hal 2, and skip ahead to 38:52).
going over sources is doing historiography. in this case it is a pointless exercise. if you want definitive dates the way to go about getting them is doing actual history and consulting the records, not extrapolating on top of secondhand sources. @@jourdanfarmer
What an amazing piece of work. Thank you so much. Can’t wait for the next episode. And hope other people here or maybe Gates himself sometime can help fill out some of the blanks :) Have you asked him for an interview?
It would be a great to get a chance to interview Gates about this period(although I’d probably want to wait until I had done the preliminary research for the RoW scripts up through Windows 98, just so that I had a full set of interview questions ready to go), but what I’d really like to do first is get access to Microsoft’s email archives from the 1980s and 1990s. Microsoft heavily utilized email almost from the beginning of the company, and being able to access those archives would undoubtedly answer many questions and clear up a lot of confusion about things that the participants themselves may no longer remember any details of.
I was finally sold on Windows in 1988 when I purchased Corel Draw 1.x which had Win 2.x runtime bundled with it. I chose Corel Draw because I needed a clean & effective draw application in order to produce technical illustrations for a proprietary industrial monitoring system. Corel Draw filled the bill nicely.
OHHH WOW!!!!! ty vm for this , i love your docus, they are extremely entertaining to watch.! PLEASE DO A RISE AND FALL OF 3DFX!!!!!!!!!!! (i had to use caps)
I don’t think the cinema world is ready for blurry 640x480 DV footage of 17 year old Jonathan dressed like a Sith and doing “The Room” levels of acting while balancing on a wobbly set in front of 20 feet of green screen made from cheap disposable tablecloths… If you want a great Star Wars fanfilm from back in the day, check out Broken Allegiance, Reign of the Fallen, and maybe Revelations. How the Sith Stole Christmas part 1 was also one I loved back then, one of the rare animated fan films.
I would not call the 286 crippled. It was, for the time, fast and powerful. The access to much more memory and processor support for multitasking meant Windows 2 and Xenix 286 was great.
So glad you enjoyed it! It definitely took a lot longer to make than I originally expected…and that was WITH splitting the script in two….since I was originally planning to cover Windows 3.0 in this part as well.
@@AnotherBoringTopicI, too, never thought part 2 would see the light of day, but it gave me time to finish the IBM PC series as well as your documentary on OS/2. What an amazing in-depth collection of reports you have here! As a former professional journalist, I can say this is very thorough and meticulous research and well cross-checked for discrepancies. Thank you for you time and effort on these in-depth videos. 🖥️
This video is so worthless; talking about corporate meetings & IBM-cards. Give me a break. Hundreds, if not a thousand great things happening as a result of Windows, cultural, cash flow, retail service, client accessibility, is all missing from this video b/c this guy is so slow in narration.
@@KreateInRealLife Sorry your attention span can't go more than five minutes without a martial arts fight scene, a car chase, or an explosion, but those of us who are history and business buffs appreciate, and can comprehend, the details. And those of us that know the history realize that it wasn't until Windows 3.0 and higher that Windows really became the mainstream idiom for graphical computing for IBM and IBM-clones...and if you had made it to the end of the video (I know, I'm taking quite the leap, here) you'd have realized Windows 3.0 wasn't even covered in this video.
I know these are a chore to put together, but it is worth it. You put together the best tech documentaries period. Your research, and production are appreciated beyond what I can express here. Thank you for your work!
Agreed -- it's pretty rare for these to be much more than a regurgitation of oft-repeated theories and cargo cult. When someone goes to the trouble to source new information, and plot out a timeline to find factual errors, it's something special. If I had one criticism, it's the annotations. I think YT'ers tend to lean way too heavily on supplemental on-screen text, _while continuing to narrate over them,_ which makes the viewer choose whether to follow the flow of dialog, or read the annotation. The animated effects don't help -- it's 5 seconds of on-screen time, where only 1 second of it contains fully readable text. That's not long enough to read some of it at all, much less with split attention (audio vs. text.) "Just pause, then!" would be OK if it happened once or twice in a video, but like I said, it gets used a lot ... which means you have to be there, finger on the pause button, ready to catch the pop-up every few minutes. That can be really distracting. Anyway, just food for thought. It's a small gripe relative to the quality of the presentation, but maybe it helps to understand the impact of various tools available to the editor.
As someone who has been reading Infoworld for fun over the past few years (i'm at July 1988 right now) and who has seen each episode of The Computer Chronicles multiple times, I was happy to come across this well-written and edited video. I will make one comment about the "shrink wrapped Windows/386" situation: I worked in a video store through college for five years in the mid-90s, spending my days unwrapping new tapes, shrink wrapping the covers with a cardboard stuffer put inside so that the cover could be put on the shelf for display, and re-shrink wrapping used tapes to be put out for sale. Because of this, I don't trust the validity of shrink wrapped items being new/unused at all (especially ones where you can see the melt line along the edges of the item, as you see in the photo). In this case I think it is best to stick with the contemporary date of Jan. 1988 as the real release date. I'm now looking forward to going back and watching your OS/2 and PC clone videos. Keep up the good work!
Great coverage. As a graduate in 1986, working in PC graphics device driver development, I lived through these developments. Without knowing the back story!
It must be nice, finally having an explanation for what happened back then in the PC world. I wish I could live long enough to have some answers for what is happening currently.
So is that just converting the raw data you get from the OS into bits readable by the video card? Or the other way around? Just taking raw bits and making something useful out of it?
@@AnotherBoringTopic lol This popped up my RUclips and I thought I'd give it a minute or two and after 20 minutes I had to bookmark and subscribe because I found your presentation so compelling and informative! TY
HMA gave you 64K - 16 bytes of extra memory. The 8086/8088 architecture used 16 bit segment registers, shifted by 4 bits, added to 16 bit pointers to give 20 bit addresses allowing 1M access. The trick was that segment FFFF with any pointer above 000F would wrap-around to 00000 on systems that had 20 address lines, like the 86/88, but would continue on to 100000 for those that had 21+ address lines, like the 286+ processors. There was one caveat though in that IBM was aware that this issue could cause bugs for 86/88 code that relied on the wrap-around and added circuitry that could enable/disable this called the A20 gate. HIMEM.SYS was the driver you loaded in DOS to disable the wrap-around.
@@tech34756 Yep. Intel had to incorporate the gate circuitry from IBM's hack into the processor when on-chip caching was introduced. If you physically shorted the pin to active the A20 gate on the XBox then the 21st address line would always be zero and the processor would start executing code at the address of the flash ROM instead of the secure ROM. Unfortunately for MS, one of the tasks of the secure ROM was to re-secure itself before transferring control to the secondary boot-loader which wouldn't happen allowing people to get a dump of the ROM.
Just as an addition, this is relevant for Windows 2.1+ because it bundled it's own HIMEM.SYS which enabled the HMA rather than using the host DOS version.
Excellent video and a big THANK YOU. I remember being told "a year in the computer field is like dog years, aka 7 years anywhere else." My career rode the wave of developments of Win 3.1/3.11 (networking), Win 9x (Internet), Win XP/7/8/10/11 (IT security). Keep up the great work!!
In 1991 I taught an Intro to Desktop Publishing class at the University of Maryland. The classroom was in an auditorium-sized room with 35 low-end PS/2 machines running Windows 2x and PageMaker. I was an expert on PageMaker for the Mac and found that PageMaker for Windows was from the Stone Age. The OS couldn’t handle the wide variety of fonts the Mac could. The only variance for fonts on PM for Winows 2x were single generic versions for serif and sans-serif fonts. You had to print out the page in order to see how things worked out. I doubt if there were any serious commercial publishers using PM on Windows 2x.
1:59:32 GEOS is the most underrated PC gui of all time. It was everything Windows should have been. It was MUCH, MUCH faster and used less RAM. One of the most common applications of the early-mid 90s used the geos runtime, AOL for DOS. My cousin actually a bought a PC in 1993 or 94 that came with GEOS as the main windows like OS.
It was crazy fast but I get the vibe that came at a price. The price being it's written in assembly which makes it almost unmovable to other platforms. I don't know know about software development on Geos but I imagine it wasn't straight forward either.
@@judewestburner Windows was written in assembly as well. C was not that common in the era on desktop PCs. I remember early Linux distros were slow as all hell. X was unusable.
I can't fully back it up but I think Windows is mostly written in C. Obv there's some assembly in the and probably early days moreso, but it was always with the thought of being portable. Certainly by the time NT was thing that's true but that's a good 7-8 years after this
Unbelievable to amount of research you did for this and your ability to present the information in a coherent interesting manner. This is awesome. Clearly a labour of love.
I certainly learned some new appreciation for win 2 in this video. My only real knowledge of the difference between win 1 and win 2 up until now was that 2.0 supported tiling windows and himem. I dont think i had heard of windows/386 at all
I had tried Ventura Publisher under GEM in the late 80's, and it was dreadful. PageMaker under Windows 2.x was better, but the screen fonts were still terrible. Everyone I knew used Macs, and I joined them. But PageMaker on Windows 3.11 had TrueType, and with a 486 PC and large 1024x768 21" monitor, I had no trouble completing a 200 page technical manual. At that point I remember thinking, "Apple is gonna have serious problems now." Whatever misgivings I may have about Microsoft, I have to credit their ability to dig in and just keep hammering away and polishing Windows. Even with the horrible Windows 8, they redeemed themselves with Windows 10.
I remember my friend's dad being a 'windows programmer' back in the late 80s. He saw it as a huge opportunity and used to tell us about it every chance he could.
I have a copy of my original Windows 286 registration card dated Sept. 5, 1989. Product #056199.110 This is when I bought a 286 with 1 MB of ram, a 5"floppy, keyboard, DOS 4.1,VGA card, and a MS Mouse (with Windows included). This all cost about $2,700 CDN. An HP Deskjet printer was another $1,000.
Thank you so much for the kind words, glad you are enjoying the content! The channel has almost 20x the subscribers it had a year ago so I can’t complain :)
One of the biggest takeaways... If IBM thinks its a good idea, and it even seems like they have a point, don't do it! They are magnetically attracted to ideas that result in stagnancy and failure!
Oh for the love of all that is good and right... please not another year before the next installment! Just came across this documentary and need more!😆 Very well done!
I believe MS must have had the separate Windows Runtime well into the Windows 3 era as well. I remember having a demo disk for Excel that I got from calling MS from an ad in a magazine and it used its own version of Windows separate from the one I had installed on my PC. My family didn't get a PC until 1992 and it came with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1, and so I assume that demo was contemporaneous with that version of Windows. Also, these videos are so well done.
If part one was 30 minutes and part two was 2 hours, then if current trends continue then part three should be *EIGHT HOURS LONG!!!* And I would watch every minute of it.
I’m very glad to hear you are enjoying the series, thank you for the kind words! Part 3 only covers Windows 3.0, and since the story is quite a bit less convoluted, the current rough draft of the script probably only runs about an hour. However I haven’t done a final pass on the script yet and it’s probably safe to assume that the final draft will be longer, but most likely not two hours long (I probably just jinxed myself). I haven’t decided yet when I’ll start focusing on it though, but it probably won’t be until after I get a couple other tech history videos out.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I mean, a two hour video would be very nice, but an hour is fine as well. I don't know the history behind windows 3.0, but I will definitely enjoy it. Would be cool for an upcoming windows 95 video to have Dave Plummer as one of the guest, considering you were able to get in touch with Tandy. Oh man, I should stop hyping myself.
@@cocusar Plummer actually runs his own YT channel called Dave's Garage, and recently interviewed Raymond Chen about events that happened in early MS. @AnotherBoringTopic getting them both on for a special would be very interesting to watch. E: Dave Cutler too, forgot to mention.
A joy to watch. That’s it. Thank you for putting so much effort into doing this series, it really pays off. Well paced, with the right amount of detail and background. Anxiously waiting for the next entry…
1:44:17 Interesting. I _suspect_ that the issue is that the high memory area (accessed via enabling address line 20 while a 286 processor is running in real mode) is, and *must* be, 64K in size. But... This block of memory is discontinuous with the normal 640 KB of memory and this limits what you can put into it. So, if you asked a _developer_ how much extra RAM was freed up via the high memory area, you might well get an answer of "50K," indicating that 50 K of program code was loaded into the HMA with 14K going to waste. This is certainly the way it worked with DOS -- if you loaded DOS into the high memory area, some portion of DOS's memory footprint would be placed in the HMA, but some portion of the HMA would be unused and inaccessible for any other purpose.
One thing that changed dramatically in the 80s and even up to 92 was the hold intel had on the 386. When AMD released their compatible processors the price dropped significantly on the hardware. Win 2 on 286 was horrible at the time and it was hardly used. Dos based applications were king gui stuff was Mac’s domain By the time you could afford a 386 system Win 3 was out. Win 2 really wasn’t a thing, well at least in my part of the globe. Absolutely fantastic video!!!!
I have the windows/386 2.0 box and on all box, books and disks it says copywrite 1987 The guide book says Compaq and IBM computers. A single papir in the box called "Device compatibility list" says: Compaq 386, AT&T 6386, HP Vectra RS, IBM PS2 model 80, Intel Inboard/AT, Olivetti M380, Wang PC 380, WYSEpc 386 model 3216, Zenith Z/300, any computer 100% with any of above. Down at last line is says "1187 Part no 01315" So i assume this mean 11-1987 and for many pcs and not only for compaq
I absolutely love your videos. Not only are they insanely well researched, but my wife thinks they're the most boring things in the world! She's wrong, of course. All that time and effort you put into these are totally worth the look on her face when I cue up "The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 2: Windows 2x" on film night.
I have the book "IBM: The Making of the Common View" in my hands, I am reading it. I can send it to you for free if you are willing to wait until I finish it. Thank you for your wonderful videos!
Since this video is 2 hours long, and the windows 1.0 was 1 hour long, logic tells us that every future doccumentary on windows versions should increase their lenght by an hour each. I'm looking forward for the 9 hour long windows 8 video (i'm cobsidering 2000 and ME in the same video) Another possible lecture tells us that future videos should not be 1 hour longer, but double the lenght. If this is the case, then i'm looking forward for the 128 hour long windows 8 video. This leaves me a doubt, why windows 7 is named windows 7 and not 8? We have windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000/me, and xp. These are already 7 windows; maybe they want to erase 2000/me from history, or maybe they don't how to count, after all, they also skipped windows 9.
This is a great video, and I can only echo the sentiments of the other comments on how well researched this is. Looking forward to Part 3 as that's where my personal journey with PCs really began. A journey that became my job, continues to provide endless opportunities for advancement and to learn and grow. You've gained a new subscriber here.
I just finished reading the "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" as cited in many parts of the video, and with corrected informations through it. A very complete and detailed video. Hats off to you, sir
Being in my 20's during this time it was very confusing being in the PC retail business. Working for a small computer store it was confusing as to why Microsoft sold Windows without a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, or Database. Later the confusion of OS/2 vs Windows was a continuous point of confusion. Working for a small clone company by this time, we started selling Windows 3.0 with Word. It was painful as the crashes happened often. They only real source of "new" information I had was InfoWorld, Computer Reseller News, and The Computer Chronical. I'm not surprised you had trouble nailing down release dates.
I think it would be better to slice very long videos like this in 30 min videos a piece, to have faster youtube processing for automatic subtitles and easier to watch for users. Not even Robert X. Cringely has done a detailed documentary like this (not that he is a great reporter). Also since a decade and more Windows market share decreases every year. Also Operating Systems are not a hot product anymore. They are just like browsers, platforms for software to run over. Best wishes.
Nawh, that's not quite a VM, it's just an extra API layer, bit like Valve's Proton. M$' .NET does more or less the same thing - it's a general API that sits on top of the OS and acts as an interpreter for bytecode into which .NET software gets compiled. So then those applications become a lot more portable from the POV of the dev who only has to write them once. M$'s maintainers look after the architectural differences between wine-dows versions as well as hardware differences. All that's needed is the right version of .NET Framework and the application is more or less guaranteed to run fine. It's like a hybrid between regular compiled code and something like the python or matlab interpreter, sacrificing *some* performance for significantly more portability.
Couldn’t agree more, absolutely phenomenal book. I bought the 2nd edition a few years ago, and more recently bought the newest edition, which had a bunch of new failures in it (the FirePhone debacle probably being my favorite).
Windows 10 without the bloat (LTSC) works well in an already 10 years old laptop, and if you give it 8gb of ram, it works fine with a Chrome based browser on top of it (with chrome eating most of the extra RAM, not Windows).
@@tolep Trying to run Windows (or any OS) on a low RAM machine and making up for it with an SSD is going to cause a huge amount of writes to the SSD and shorten it's lifetime considerably. If at all possible shove as much RAM as you can in that machine.
@@mrflamewars the reality of older laptops is that motherboards don't support massive amounts of RAM so an SSD is a considerably wider supported upgrade path and unless you plan on keeping a laptop for the next 20 years SSD lifetime won't be an issue for the vast majority of users and in that case the price of SSDs are so cheap you can simply replace them.
Sir, the amount of detail rewarded to us by your exhaustive and impeccable research is truly amazing. Please tell me that there will be a forthcoming "The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 3," and that it will be coming out soon. On a very side note....one story of computer history that I believe gets overlooked (or completely misrepresented) is the Tandy TRS-80, part of the "trilogy" that started the real consumer computer market (not the hobbyist and tinkerer audience of the Altair). People don't seem to realize that due to Radio Shack's ubiquity in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, the TRS-80 was first outselling the Apple II and the Commodore PET by a wide margin, especially before VisiCalc for the Apple II was released. I've seen some decent videos on this topic, but none with the great detail and historical context you've provided with your great video. Thank you again, and as I stated previously, I'm looking forward to Part 3 of this series, when we all saw, before our very eyes, how Windows 3.x exploded onto the scene, and set an industry standard.
The videos you put out, is simply THE BEST tech documentaries i have ever seen! Thank you, for your time and dedication, that you so clearly put into making these videos!
We haven’t set up anything like Patreon yet, and a big reason is because of how irregularly we release new content. It does feel like a lot to ask for regular donations for a channel that will only irregularly release a handful of videos a year and will never have a regular release schedule. Videos aren’t released until we are happy with them, and that doesn’t work well with any sort of schedule. Last year for example we put out two tech history videos from me, plus a military history video from David and another one from Bill. Plus I guess two RUclips shorts from me. We’ve looked at buymeacoffee a little bit, since it seems to have more of a focus on making it easy to do one-off donations, but we haven’t made a decision yet. It’s always great to hear from people enjoying the content, thanks for taking the time to leave a comment! Best wishes, Jonathan
RoW part 4 will cover Windows 3.1, but it probably won’t be released until late next year. The script for part 3 (Windows 3.0) has been basically complete for months now, but I can’t focus on doing the final revision pass and then recording it until I’m closer to finishing editing the Steve Jobs and Next part 2 video.
SAA is a specification for a software compatibility layer, or rather, a common API, but it is more similar to POSIX and does not need a VM. Its not 'binary compatibility' as much as API level compatibility. CUA... there are still many things remaining from CUA, like f1 often being 'help', f4 often letting you pick from the items in a listbox, tab switching to the next element in a form, etc.
First: This video and this series is amazing. Thank you! Second: You said Windows/386 brought preemptive multitasking, but I seem to recall that that was one of Windows 95’s big new improvements over Windows 3.1. Do I misremember?
This is a good question and one that I am putting into the extended thoughts Substack post for RoW2 that I should hopefully be posting in the next week or so. In short, Windows/386 did have a form of preemptive multitasking, but it seems to have been about the most basic implementation possible and was not multithreaded.
Ba haha! Us Commodore aficionados don't care about their modest line of IBM compatibles. Please do tell us O' story teller of glorious tales of Commodore's Amiga and how Workbench kicked Windows 2.x arse.
I dunno…I’ve already done one video on a company with a great product that was consistently and relentlessly self-sabotaged by a company that was its own worst enemy…and everything that IBM was to OS/2 applies double (or triple) to Commodore and the Amiga… In all seriousness, I probably won’t ever cover the Amiga directly, unless I felt that I had something new to bring to the field. However I DO plan to do a full video on the Video Toaster at some point. For a while now I’ve been trying to get my hands on as much research material as possible, including issues of Video Toaster magazine. Sadly I only have two issues so far, but I do have a slowly increasing stack of other research materials and at some point(definitely not for a while) I’ll start scripting.
Best news all day that this video dropped! I was hoping it would come at some point. I know these are labors of love, but they are fantastic and greatly appreciated! Which reminds me to check if you have a Patreon or similar... Keep it up!
Extended thoughts Substack post
anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-microsoft-windows-2x
Topics covered:
Did Microsoft copy the Macintosh with Windows 2x?
IBM and the 386
Windows 2x bundle deals with OEM’s
When did Compaq start working with Microsoft on Windows/386?
Windows/386 Preemptive Multitasking
Who All Worked on Windows 2x?
Why was the 286 considered crippled?
the ungodly amount of work put into your content ... thank you!
MICROSOFT BECAME NUMBER ONE BECAUSE OF VERY HIGH MARHINS!!!! OFFICE 1997 SOLD FOR $550 IN
STORES!!! DEALERS IN THE 1990'S PAID $60 PER COPY!!!!! ALL OF THE PROFIT ON A SALE
CAME FROM SELLING MICROSOFT SOFTWARE!!! OTHER VENDORS HAD $15 OR $20 PROFITS(WASTE OF TIME).
THEN IN 2000, MICROSOFT DECIDED TO PUT IT'S 50,000(SMALL DEALERS) OUT OF BUSINESS!!!
MICROSOFT TOOK AWAY THE MARGINS AND DELL LOWERED THE COST OF ITS COMPUTERS.
LOSS OF PROFIT MARGINS ON BOTH SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE FORCED 50,000 SMALL DEALERS
OUT OF BUSINESS. MICROSOFT HAD DECIDED IT ONLY WANTED LARGE CUSTOMERS AND MFG. DELL, HP, IBM
TO SELL ITS PRODUCTS!!!! THE STOCK PRICE WAS 29 IN 2000, THE STOCK PRICE DECLINES FOR 13 YEARS
AFTER IT GOT RID OF ITS SMALL DEALERS!! IN 2013 THE STOCK RECOVERED BACK TO $29.
My dude not only do you have a PRIMARY source, you're correcting some of the secondary sources. You put so much work into this. Thank you.
Popcorn deployed!
BTW, see quite possibly the most enthusiastic tech demo _in history_ , of OS/2 2.1 by IBM's David Barnes: Google inexplicably won't allow me to include a link to YT video, but search for 1993 hal os/2, and skip ahead to 38:52
Popcorn deployed!
WTFF! My reply was DELETED, where _bizarrely_ Google doesn't want you to see EPIC OS 2 tech demo (search for 1993 hal 2, and skip ahead to 38:52).
This is so dumb. He speculated about possible corrections, presuming everyone involved acted rationally, in a story about people acting irrationally
@@kilgoarhe’s also pointing out incongruities between sources and curating the strongest historical record of this topic to date
going over sources is doing historiography. in this case it is a pointless exercise. if you want definitive dates the way to go about getting them is doing actual history and consulting the records, not extrapolating on top of secondhand sources. @@jourdanfarmer
What an amazing piece of work. Thank you so much. Can’t wait for the next episode. And hope other people here or maybe Gates himself sometime can help fill out some of the blanks :) Have you asked him for an interview?
It would be a great to get a chance to interview Gates about this period(although I’d probably want to wait until I had done the preliminary research for the RoW scripts up through Windows 98, just so that I had a full set of interview questions ready to go), but what I’d really like to do first is get access to Microsoft’s email archives from the 1980s and 1990s.
Microsoft heavily utilized email almost from the beginning of the company, and being able to access those archives would undoubtedly answer many questions and clear up a lot of confusion about things that the participants themselves may no longer remember any details of.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Ahh that would be great. The also have an archive in Redmond as I remember from my time working at MS.
Thank you! Been anxiously waiting for part two!
I was finally sold on Windows in 1988 when I purchased Corel Draw 1.x which had Win 2.x runtime bundled with it. I chose Corel Draw because I needed a clean & effective draw application in order to produce technical illustrations for a proprietary industrial monitoring system. Corel Draw filled the bill nicely.
OMG. I cant wait for Part 3 long. This is so good stuff.
Really enjoying these so far keep them up. So much is said about Windows 95 onward hardly a peep about the first 3 versions.
Thank you for this, your effort is well worth it and appreciated!
OHHH WOW!!!!! ty vm for this , i love your docus, they are extremely entertaining to watch.!
PLEASE DO A RISE AND FALL OF 3DFX!!!!!!!!!!! (i had to use caps)
Can't wait for the next part, and hopefully that Darth Vader you mentioned footage at 1:26:00
I don’t think the cinema world is ready for blurry 640x480 DV footage of 17 year old Jonathan dressed like a Sith and doing “The Room” levels of acting while balancing on a wobbly set in front of 20 feet of green screen made from cheap disposable tablecloths…
If you want a great Star Wars fanfilm from back in the day, check out Broken Allegiance, Reign of the Fallen, and maybe Revelations. How the Sith Stole Christmas part 1 was also one I loved back then, one of the rare animated fan films.
I would not call the 286 crippled. It was, for the time, fast and powerful. The access to much more memory and processor support for multitasking meant Windows 2 and Xenix 286 was great.
I’m going to be honest, I thought this part 2 was never going to come out. I should have never doubted you. This is awesome
So glad you enjoyed it! It definitely took a lot longer to make than I originally expected…and that was WITH splitting the script in two….since I was originally planning to cover Windows 3.0 in this part as well.
@@AnotherBoringTopicI, too, never thought part 2 would see the light of day, but it gave me time to finish the IBM PC series as well as your documentary on OS/2. What an amazing in-depth collection of reports you have here!
As a former professional journalist, I can say this is very thorough and meticulous research and well cross-checked for discrepancies. Thank you for you time and effort on these in-depth videos. 🖥️
This video is so worthless; talking about corporate meetings & IBM-cards. Give me a break. Hundreds, if not a thousand great things happening as a result of Windows, cultural, cash flow, retail service, client accessibility, is all missing from this video b/c this guy is so slow in narration.
@@KreateInRealLife Sorry your attention span can't go more than five minutes without a martial arts fight scene, a car chase, or an explosion, but those of us who are history and business buffs appreciate, and can comprehend, the details. And those of us that know the history realize that it wasn't until Windows 3.0 and higher that Windows really became the mainstream idiom for graphical computing for IBM and IBM-clones...and if you had made it to the end of the video (I know, I'm taking quite the leap, here) you'd have realized Windows 3.0 wasn't even covered in this video.
@@KreateInRealLife juvenile comment
another boring topic uploaded so my day is not boring anymore
I know these are a chore to put together, but it is worth it. You put together the best tech documentaries period. Your research, and production are appreciated beyond what I can express here. Thank you for your work!
Thank you so much for compliment, glad you are enjoying the videos!
Agreed -- it's pretty rare for these to be much more than a regurgitation of oft-repeated theories and cargo cult. When someone goes to the trouble to source new information, and plot out a timeline to find factual errors, it's something special.
If I had one criticism, it's the annotations. I think YT'ers tend to lean way too heavily on supplemental on-screen text, _while continuing to narrate over them,_ which makes the viewer choose whether to follow the flow of dialog, or read the annotation. The animated effects don't help -- it's 5 seconds of on-screen time, where only 1 second of it contains fully readable text. That's not long enough to read some of it at all, much less with split attention (audio vs. text.) "Just pause, then!" would be OK if it happened once or twice in a video, but like I said, it gets used a lot ... which means you have to be there, finger on the pause button, ready to catch the pop-up every few minutes. That can be really distracting.
Anyway, just food for thought. It's a small gripe relative to the quality of the presentation, but maybe it helps to understand the impact of various tools available to the editor.
100% this
Oh man I've been waiting ages for this
same
same
It's gonna be a long year waiting for a 3.0 video
I dunno... kinda feel misled. I didn't yawn once.
Windows 1 video = 2023
Windows 2 video = 2024
Windows 95 video - I'll be dead and decomposed.
More like "feature films" at this 2+ hours mark
We're only at Windows 11, Windows 95 won't come out for a very long time
Plot twist: XP.
Hasta la Vista!
It will probably go faster. He said that the OS/2 vid had to come out first. Now I see why he did that before this.
@@dismuter_yt Windows 95 came out along time ago... Like last century, right sfter Windows 3.x
As someone who has been reading Infoworld for fun over the past few years (i'm at July 1988 right now) and who has seen each episode of The Computer Chronicles multiple times, I was happy to come across this well-written and edited video. I will make one comment about the "shrink wrapped Windows/386" situation: I worked in a video store through college for five years in the mid-90s, spending my days unwrapping new tapes, shrink wrapping the covers with a cardboard stuffer put inside so that the cover could be put on the shelf for display, and re-shrink wrapping used tapes to be put out for sale. Because of this, I don't trust the validity of shrink wrapped items being new/unused at all (especially ones where you can see the melt line along the edges of the item, as you see in the photo). In this case I think it is best to stick with the contemporary date of Jan. 1988 as the real release date. I'm now looking forward to going back and watching your OS/2 and PC clone videos. Keep up the good work!
Great coverage. As a graduate in 1986, working in PC graphics device driver development, I lived through these developments. Without knowing the back story!
It must be nice, finally having an explanation for what happened back then in the PC world.
I wish I could live long enough to have some answers for what is happening currently.
So is that just converting the raw data you get from the OS into bits readable by the video card? Or the other way around? Just taking raw bits and making something useful out of it?
Excellent presentation. And, unlike so many RUclips presenters, you are an excellent speaker. A pleasure to listen to. Thank you.
Appreciate the compliment, glad you enjoyed the video!
@@AnotherBoringTopic lol This popped up my RUclips and I thought I'd give it a minute or two and after 20 minutes I had to bookmark and subscribe because I found your presentation so compelling and informative! TY
I think this is the best channel for computer (science) history. Keep up the good work!
HMA gave you 64K - 16 bytes of extra memory. The 8086/8088 architecture used 16 bit segment registers, shifted by 4 bits, added to 16 bit pointers to give 20 bit addresses allowing 1M access. The trick was that segment FFFF with any pointer above 000F would wrap-around to 00000 on systems that had 20 address lines, like the 86/88, but would continue on to 100000 for those that had 21+ address lines, like the 286+ processors. There was one caveat though in that IBM was aware that this issue could cause bugs for 86/88 code that relied on the wrap-around and added circuitry that could enable/disable this called the A20 gate. HIMEM.SYS was the driver you loaded in DOS to disable the wrap-around.
Ironically, IBM's workaround would byte MS in the butt on the OG Xbox, as it was used as one of several exploits to hack the system.
@@tech34756 Yep. Intel had to incorporate the gate circuitry from IBM's hack into the processor when on-chip caching was introduced. If you physically shorted the pin to active the A20 gate on the XBox then the 21st address line would always be zero and the processor would start executing code at the address of the flash ROM instead of the secure ROM. Unfortunately for MS, one of the tasks of the secure ROM was to re-secure itself before transferring control to the secondary boot-loader which wouldn't happen allowing people to get a dump of the ROM.
Just as an addition, this is relevant for Windows 2.1+ because it bundled it's own HIMEM.SYS which enabled the HMA rather than using the host DOS version.
Excellent video and a big THANK YOU. I remember being told "a year in the computer field is like dog years, aka 7 years anywhere else." My career rode the wave of developments of Win 3.1/3.11 (networking), Win 9x (Internet), Win XP/7/8/10/11 (IT security). Keep up the great work!!
In 1991 I taught an Intro to Desktop Publishing class at the University of Maryland. The classroom was in an auditorium-sized room with 35 low-end PS/2 machines running Windows 2x and PageMaker. I was an expert on PageMaker for the Mac and found that PageMaker for Windows was from the Stone Age. The OS couldn’t handle the wide variety of fonts the Mac could. The only variance for fonts on PM for Winows 2x were single generic versions for serif and sans-serif fonts. You had to print out the page in order to see how things worked out. I doubt if there were any serious commercial publishers using PM on Windows 2x.
1:59:32 GEOS is the most underrated PC gui of all time. It was everything Windows should have been. It was MUCH, MUCH faster and used less RAM. One of the most common applications of the early-mid 90s used the geos runtime, AOL for DOS. My cousin actually a bought a PC in 1993 or 94 that came with GEOS as the main windows like OS.
I remember getting my hands on an old PC (I think it was a Tandy) and getting GEOS running on it… It really was a brilliant GUI for the time.
It was crazy fast but I get the vibe that came at a price. The price being it's written in assembly which makes it almost unmovable to other platforms. I don't know know about software development on Geos but I imagine it wasn't straight forward either.
@@judewestburner Windows was written in assembly as well. C was not that common in the era on desktop PCs. I remember early Linux distros were slow as all hell. X was unusable.
I can't fully back it up but I think Windows is mostly written in C. Obv there's some assembly in the and probably early days moreso, but it was always with the thought of being portable.
Certainly by the time NT was thing that's true but that's a good 7-8 years after this
And I completely agree with you on Linux and X
Unbelievable to amount of research you did for this and your ability to present the information in a coherent interesting manner. This is awesome. Clearly a labour of love.
This is a proper documentary. Wow. This was worth the wait. Please do not be discouraged by the views! This is amazing!
They worked hard to free an extra 64K of memory 😂.... Today, upgrading from 32 GB to 64 GB, 500.000 times that amount, is $ 80 - in today's dollars.
I certainly learned some new appreciation for win 2 in this video. My only real knowledge of the difference between win 1 and win 2 up until now was that 2.0 supported tiling windows and himem. I dont think i had heard of windows/386 at all
I had tried Ventura Publisher under GEM in the late 80's, and it was dreadful. PageMaker under Windows 2.x was better, but the screen fonts were still terrible. Everyone I knew used Macs, and I joined them. But PageMaker on Windows 3.11 had TrueType, and with a 486 PC and large 1024x768 21" monitor, I had no trouble completing a 200 page technical manual. At that point I remember thinking, "Apple is gonna have serious problems now." Whatever misgivings I may have about Microsoft, I have to credit their ability to dig in and just keep hammering away and polishing Windows. Even with the horrible Windows 8, they redeemed themselves with Windows 10.
This video was definitely worth the wait. Amazing research!! 🎉🎉
I remember my friend's dad being a 'windows programmer' back in the late 80s. He saw it as a huge opportunity and used to tell us about it every chance he could.
I have a copy of my original Windows 286 registration card dated Sept. 5, 1989. Product #056199.110 This is when I bought a 286 with 1 MB of ram, a 5"floppy, keyboard, DOS 4.1,VGA card, and a MS Mouse (with Windows included). This all cost about $2,700 CDN. An HP Deskjet printer was another $1,000.
I just rewatched the first one last night and then this is posted today, i couldn't be happier 🥰
It's a shame you don't have at least an order of magnitude more subscribers. These documentaries are *excellent!*
Thank you so much for the kind words, glad you are enjoying the content!
The channel has almost 20x the subscribers it had a year ago so I can’t complain :)
One of the biggest takeaways... If IBM thinks its a good idea, and it even seems like they have a point, don't do it! They are magnetically attracted to ideas that result in stagnancy and failure!
¡¿BORING?! It's not boring, its enriching and interesting.
Oh for the love of all that is good and right... please not another year before the next installment! Just came across this documentary and need more!😆 Very well done!
You know this actually gives me sympathy for windows a little.
I believe MS must have had the separate Windows Runtime well into the Windows 3 era as well. I remember having a demo disk for Excel that I got from calling MS from an ad in a magazine and it used its own version of Windows separate from the one I had installed on my PC. My family didn't get a PC until 1992 and it came with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1, and so I assume that demo was contemporaneous with that version of Windows.
Also, these videos are so well done.
There was a thing in the 90s called Modular Windows and it might have been exactly what you described
Tandy Deskmate was better and more useful than Windows before 3.0.
Here comes another excellent docu. Well done!
If part one was 30 minutes and part two was 2 hours, then if current trends continue then part three should be *EIGHT HOURS LONG!!!* And I would watch every minute of it.
I'm really enjoying this series, I'm more than hyped for the next entry (windows 3 through 3.11?).Thank you for this research and outstanding video.
I’m very glad to hear you are enjoying the series, thank you for the kind words!
Part 3 only covers Windows 3.0, and since the story is quite a bit less convoluted, the current rough draft of the script probably only runs about an hour. However I haven’t done a final pass on the script yet and it’s probably safe to assume that the final draft will be longer, but most likely not two hours long (I probably just jinxed myself).
I haven’t decided yet when I’ll start focusing on it though, but it probably won’t be until after I get a couple other tech history videos out.
@@AnotherBoringTopic I mean, a two hour video would be very nice, but an hour is fine as well. I don't know the history behind windows 3.0, but I will definitely enjoy it. Would be cool for an upcoming windows 95 video to have Dave Plummer as one of the guest, considering you were able to get in touch with Tandy. Oh man, I should stop hyping myself.
@@cocusar Plummer actually runs his own YT channel called Dave's Garage, and recently interviewed Raymond Chen about events that happened in early MS. @AnotherBoringTopic getting them both on for a special would be very interesting to watch.
E: Dave Cutler too, forgot to mention.
A joy to watch. That’s it. Thank you for putting so much effort into doing this series, it really pays off. Well paced, with the right amount of detail and background. Anxiously waiting for the next entry…
1:44:17 Interesting. I _suspect_ that the issue is that the high memory area (accessed via enabling address line 20 while a 286 processor is running in real mode) is, and *must* be, 64K in size.
But...
This block of memory is discontinuous with the normal 640 KB of memory and this limits what you can put into it. So, if you asked a _developer_ how much extra RAM was freed up via the high memory area, you might well get an answer of "50K," indicating that 50 K of program code was loaded into the HMA with 14K going to waste.
This is certainly the way it worked with DOS -- if you loaded DOS into the high memory area, some portion of DOS's memory footprint would be placed in the HMA, but some portion of the HMA would be unused and inaccessible for any other purpose.
This is a fascinating explanation, thank you for taking the time to comment!
One thing that changed dramatically in the 80s and even up to 92 was the hold intel had on the 386. When AMD released their compatible processors the price dropped significantly on the hardware. Win 2 on 286 was horrible at the time and it was hardly used. Dos based applications were king gui stuff was Mac’s domain By the time you could afford a 386 system Win 3 was out. Win 2 really wasn’t a thing, well at least in my part of the globe. Absolutely fantastic video!!!!
I have the windows/386 2.0 box and on all box, books and disks it says copywrite 1987
The guide book says Compaq and IBM computers.
A single papir in the box called "Device compatibility list" says:
Compaq 386, AT&T 6386, HP Vectra RS, IBM PS2 model 80, Intel Inboard/AT, Olivetti M380, Wang PC 380, WYSEpc 386 model 3216, Zenith Z/300, any computer 100% with any of above.
Down at last line is says "1187 Part no 01315"
So i assume this mean 11-1987 and for many pcs and not only for compaq
I absolutely love your videos. Not only are they insanely well researched, but my wife thinks they're the most boring things in the world! She's wrong, of course. All that time and effort you put into these are totally worth the look on her face when I cue up "The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 2: Windows 2x" on film night.
😂
2 Hours of great narration! thank you!
1:23:36 All you need to know about future videos)
I have the book "IBM: The Making of the Common View" in my hands, I am reading it.
I can send it to you for free if you are willing to wait until I finish it.
Thank you for your wonderful videos!
That would be great and much appreciated! Just send me an email when you are done with it, and I’ll let you know where to send it :)
I'm very disappointed. I was promised boring, but this wasn't.
I'm more excited about the next part of this than I am for Deadpool 3!
Since this video is 2 hours long, and the windows 1.0 was 1 hour long, logic tells us that every future doccumentary on windows versions should increase their lenght by an hour each. I'm looking forward for the 9 hour long windows 8 video (i'm cobsidering 2000 and ME in the same video)
Another possible lecture tells us that future videos should not be 1 hour longer, but double the lenght. If this is the case, then i'm looking forward for the 128 hour long windows 8 video.
This leaves me a doubt, why windows 7 is named windows 7 and not 8? We have windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000/me, and xp. These are already 7 windows; maybe they want to erase 2000/me from history, or maybe they don't how to count, after all, they also skipped windows 9.
This is so freekin' good!! A mammoth documentary! Amazing work. One of my favourite things on the subject already.
Great vid. Worth the wait
This is a great video, and I can only echo the sentiments of the other comments on how well researched this is.
Looking forward to Part 3 as that's where my personal journey with PCs really began. A journey that became my job, continues to provide endless opportunities for advancement and to learn and grow.
You've gained a new subscriber here.
I just finished reading the "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" as cited in many parts of the video, and with corrected informations through it. A very complete and detailed video. Hats off to you, sir
Awesome, glad you enjoyed it!
Being in my 20's during this time it was very confusing being in the PC retail business. Working for a small computer store it was confusing as to why Microsoft sold Windows without a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, or Database. Later the confusion of OS/2 vs Windows was a continuous point of confusion. Working for a small clone company by this time, we started selling Windows 3.0 with Word. It was painful as the crashes happened often. They only real source of "new" information I had was InfoWorld, Computer Reseller News, and The Computer Chronical. I'm not surprised you had trouble nailing down release dates.
I think it would be better to slice very long videos like this in 30 min videos a piece, to have faster youtube processing for automatic subtitles and easier to watch for users.
Not even Robert X. Cringely has done a detailed documentary like this (not that he is a great reporter).
Also since a decade and more Windows market share decreases every year.
Also Operating Systems are not a hot product anymore. They are just like browsers, platforms for software to run over.
Best wishes.
Finally, actual development history videos, and not just "let's look at beta builds and compare visual differences" clickbait
Part 1: Windows 1, 1 hour
Part 2: Windows 2, 2 hours...
You may have some slightly unrealistic expectations for the Windows 2000 video…
Nawh, that's not quite a VM, it's just an extra API layer, bit like Valve's Proton. M$' .NET does more or less the same thing - it's a general API that sits on top of the OS and acts as an interpreter for bytecode into which .NET software gets compiled. So then those applications become a lot more portable from the POV of the dev who only has to write them once. M$'s maintainers look after the architectural differences between wine-dows versions as well as hardware differences. All that's needed is the right version of .NET Framework and the application is more or less guaranteed to run fine.
It's like a hybrid between regular compiled code and something like the python or matlab interpreter, sacrificing *some* performance for significantly more portability.
Unironically excited for 2025 when the Windows 3.x video comes out 👀👀👀👀
I will be waiting until 2030 to watch it
This channel is awesome
Amazing video! Made my day! Cant wait for the windows 3.0 video :)
Check out the book "In Search of Stupidity" by Merril Chapman. It's a whole book of extraordinary stupidity in the tech industry.
Couldn’t agree more, absolutely phenomenal book. I bought the 2nd edition a few years ago, and more recently bought the newest edition, which had a bunch of new failures in it (the FirePhone debacle probably being my favorite).
@@AnotherBoringTopic I didn't know they had a new version out. Thanks. I'll check it out.
"Windows requires too much power". That still goes.
🙃🤣 That's because they want to stay true to tradition 😋
Not really. Windows 11 works just fine on a laptop shipped originally with Win7, i if you have 4GB of RAM and HDD replaced with SSD.
Windows 10 without the bloat (LTSC) works well in an already 10 years old laptop, and if you give it 8gb of ram, it works fine with a Chrome based browser on top of it (with chrome eating most of the extra RAM, not Windows).
@@tolep Trying to run Windows (or any OS) on a low RAM machine and making up for it with an SSD is going to cause a huge amount of writes to the SSD and shorten it's lifetime considerably. If at all possible shove as much RAM as you can in that machine.
@@mrflamewars the reality of older laptops is that motherboards don't support massive amounts of RAM so an SSD is a considerably wider supported upgrade path and unless you plan on keeping a laptop for the next 20 years SSD lifetime won't be an issue for the vast majority of users and in that case the price of SSDs are so cheap you can simply replace them.
Another Fascinating Topic 😈
Sir, the amount of detail rewarded to us by your exhaustive and impeccable research is truly amazing. Please tell me that there will be a forthcoming "The Rise of Microsoft Windows Part 3," and that it will be coming out soon.
On a very side note....one story of computer history that I believe gets overlooked (or completely misrepresented) is the Tandy TRS-80, part of the "trilogy" that started the real consumer computer market (not the hobbyist and tinkerer audience of the Altair). People don't seem to realize that due to Radio Shack's ubiquity in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, the TRS-80 was first outselling the Apple II and the Commodore PET by a wide margin, especially before VisiCalc for the Apple II was released. I've seen some decent videos on this topic, but none with the great detail and historical context you've provided with your great video.
Thank you again, and as I stated previously, I'm looking forward to Part 3 of this series, when we all saw, before our very eyes, how Windows 3.x exploded onto the scene, and set an industry standard.
I can't wait for the next episode.
Great work, thank you Sir!
Awesome 2 hours. Waiting for the part 3.😊
The videos you put out, is simply THE BEST tech documentaries i have ever seen! Thank you, for your time and dedication, that you so clearly put into making these videos!
This is absolutely brilliant and self evidently took months of research and planning. Capital show Sir. Peter. - United Kingdom.
Man, I wish I had been born early enough to have lived through this weird gold rush of an era, to have been apart of it somehow.
Intelligent source of inspiration and intrigue Microsoft.
never boring
This channel should be way bigger than it is!
Great content, and research, I feel like I’m watching a book.
Windows, arguably until Windows 98, is a shell, or an overlay at best.
Steve Ballmer doing the Windows 1 commercial at the very beginning reminds me of Glenn from Superstore
I never knew of WIndows 2. I eat this 80's retro PC stuff up like candy. Thanks for the video!
How can we give you money for this
We haven’t set up anything like Patreon yet, and a big reason is because of how irregularly we release new content. It does feel like a lot to ask for regular donations for a channel that will only irregularly release a handful of videos a year and will never have a regular release schedule. Videos aren’t released until we are happy with them, and that doesn’t work well with any sort of schedule.
Last year for example we put out two tech history videos from me, plus a military history video from David and another one from Bill. Plus I guess two RUclips shorts from me.
We’ve looked at buymeacoffee a little bit, since it seems to have more of a focus on making it easy to do one-off donations, but we haven’t made a decision yet.
It’s always great to hear from people enjoying the content, thanks for taking the time to leave a comment!
Best wishes,
Jonathan
When's part 3.1 coming out, my guy?
RoW part 4 will cover Windows 3.1, but it probably won’t be released until late next year.
The script for part 3 (Windows 3.0) has been basically complete for months now, but I can’t focus on doing the final revision pass and then recording it until I’m closer to finishing editing the Steve Jobs and Next part 2 video.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Right on. Your content is exquisite.
Nice job. And that is not praise I usually give to history of my industry.
SAA is a specification for a software compatibility layer, or rather, a common API, but it is more similar to POSIX and does not need a VM. Its not 'binary compatibility' as much as API level compatibility.
CUA... there are still many things remaining from CUA, like f1 often being 'help', f4 often letting you pick from the items in a listbox, tab switching to the next element in a form, etc.
First: This video and this series is amazing. Thank you!
Second: You said Windows/386 brought preemptive multitasking, but I seem to recall that that was one of Windows 95’s big new improvements over Windows 3.1. Do I misremember?
This is a good question and one that I am putting into the extended thoughts Substack post for RoW2 that I should hopefully be posting in the next week or so.
In short, Windows/386 did have a form of preemptive multitasking, but it seems to have been about the most basic implementation possible and was not multithreaded.
It's here 😭
Never hit subscribe as fast at the end of a video. Can’t wait for the next instalment. Rock on dudes
Amazing work! Can't imagine all the research and editing required to produce this second masterpiece. Thank you so much!
Jesus what a well done documentary. This is gold! It’s gold Jerry! Gold!
Ba haha! Us Commodore aficionados don't care about their modest line of IBM compatibles. Please do tell us O' story teller of glorious tales of Commodore's Amiga and how Workbench kicked Windows 2.x arse.
I dunno…I’ve already done one video on a company with a great product that was consistently and relentlessly self-sabotaged by a company that was its own worst enemy…and everything that IBM was to OS/2 applies double (or triple) to Commodore and the Amiga…
In all seriousness, I probably won’t ever cover the Amiga directly, unless I felt that I had something new to bring to the field.
However I DO plan to do a full video on the Video Toaster at some point. For a while now I’ve been trying to get my hands on as much research material as possible, including issues of Video Toaster magazine. Sadly I only have two issues so far, but I do have a slowly increasing stack of other research materials and at some point(definitely not for a while) I’ll start scripting.
I love that the Apple II GS is right on the same page as Windows/386, and the Compaq 386
An absolute pleasure-no distracting background music and a flawless presentation.
Video on Windows 1: ~1 hour
Video on Windows 2: ~2 hours
can't wait for 4 days of documentary on Windows 95 😃
RUclips is limited to 10 hour videos would have to be multiple videos
Best news all day that this video dropped! I was hoping it would come at some point. I know these are labors of love, but they are fantastic and greatly appreciated! Which reminds me to check if you have a Patreon or similar...
Keep it up!
Another great video!
Thanks!
Thanks so much for the donation, glad you enjoyed the video!
Need to get part 2 in my watch list, so glad you're back 😁
I was waiting for this since I have seen part one of this! Thank you! Its awesome!
This work is very important. Thank you for your dedication.
Thank you so much for the kind words, glad you are enjoying the videos!