In message , Tony Bryer
writes
On 30 Jan 2015 17:01:16 GMT Huge wrote :
I finally got exposed to Windows at the very beginning of NT. I was
appalled. It was obviously a mountain of hacks, side-effects,
inconsistent UI widgets ...

In fairness to MS part of that is down to having to try and maintain
compatibility with all sorts of software and hardware that may go back
a decade or two. I think it's quite a remarkable achievement that
Vista will run 1990 SuperBeam 1 and Windows 8, 1998 SuperBeam 4.0.

In "fairness" to MS, DOS only survived because of the anti-competitive
tricks that Gates got up to which stifled the alternatives and lumbered
us with his largely pirated ****e forever more. At the time there was a
better application than everything that MS could put out there.
Raymond Chen's book 'The Old New Thing' is a wonderful insight into
some of these challenges

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.../tags/history/


--
bert