It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.
Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".
My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
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In Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box:
ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit)
Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
Time started moving faster after smartphones began to steal our reflective moments.
I don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)
Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
Funnily enough the Linux Kernel still use patches (and of course Git has helpers to create and import patches)
maybe merging patch files was a thing way before git?
As a comparison, CVS is from 1990, SVN from 2000 (and RCS from 82)
> this manual process was largely automated
Priceless.
Windows is like real life archeology. You can dig up the UI of ancient generations of humans before you underneath the modern facade.
It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.
Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".
My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
In Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box:
ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit)
Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
Time started moving faster after smartphones began to steal our reflective moments.
I don't know how old are you bit if you are in your 40s it's s just because you were a kid when Win95 came out and time seems longer when you are a kid (less routine, everything new, more attention all the time etc)
You don’t need git to get something “as simple as a git merge” (Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3)
Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3), so three-way merges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(version_control)#Three-...) predate git by decades.
Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
Funnily enough the Linux Kernel still use patches (and of course Git has helpers to create and import patches)
maybe merging patch files was a thing way before git?
As a comparison, CVS is from 1990, SVN from 2000 (and RCS from 82)
> this manual process was largely automated
Priceless.
Windows is like real life archeology. You can dig up the UI of ancient generations of humans before you underneath the modern facade.
Extant versions of the work-in-progress Shell Technology Preview “NewShell” on NT 3.51, with screenshots: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Shell_Technology_Preview
Really wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
You still can. Run any program in compatibility mode; the Windows 2000 boxy UI is still there. As is the Windows Vista Aero Basic theme.
Like I always say, the user-mode of Windows is easiest to change, that's why it has been done almost every version.
Yes, that would be glorious. Could be the XP UI too… have some more flexibility around themes.
Did you try it?
I can't immediately see why explorer.exe wouldn't run and give you a start menu
> and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
It won't compile.
Probably the 10 extra bits.
The extra 84 win have to go somewhere
11 more and it will run on win95 again.
I prefer to believe they just merged the two branches in SourceSafe.
Microsoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.
Hmm. Not sure I agree. The initial CLR for .net was in vss. Maybe it wasn’t important, but bonus points if you know why.
No definitely not true. It was in Source Depot if not SLM.
Personally, I enjoyed MS source safe and exclusive file locking.
I loved SourceSafe for the disappearing files, and the usual "John locked the file and he went on holidays."
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