Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985)

Re:Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985) by mschaef on Monday November 20, 2017 @03:01PM (#15742734)

Thanks for sharing. Was there able to be any code sharing between the Motif/OpenLook versions and the DOS/OS/2 versions? (Or just concepts?)

The other thing I should've mentioned is that at the time, OS/2 did look like the surer bet than Windows. The success of Windows surprised everybody (including, I think, Microsoft.)

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Re:Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985) by bboreham on Monday November 20, 2017 @05:00PM (#15743708)

The spreadsheet engine was a port of the DOS version, which by that time was written in C. The GUI ran as a separate process and communicated with the engine via a character protocol into a bastardised "terminal driver".

This fabulous kludge was driven by the testing regime: if we changed one byte of the spreadsheet engine it would trigger person-years of manual testing.

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Re:Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985) by yuhong on Monday November 20, 2017 @04:19PM (#15743393)

Indeed the OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of the worst debacles in MS's history.

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Re:Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985) by mschaef on Monday November 20, 2017 @05:05PM (#15743741)

Technical issues aside, Windows by itself made MS >$100B over the last 10 years. If that's 'one of the worst debacles'...

(I did like MS OS/2 2.0 though...)

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Re:Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985) by yuhong on Monday November 20, 2017 @05:57PM (#15744130)

One of the reasons is the unethical attacks they did later on.

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