I've lately had occasion to do some work using Visual Studio 6 on Windows 98. This was for an old application that needed to run on '98, so I decided to go as primitive as possible, and pulled out the MSDN DVDs from 2004 or thereabouts and went to work.
Ugh. Vile.
Windows 98 itself was a barrel of laughs. It came up alright as a Virtual PC, and - remembering how swap-happy that OS was - I was able to create a RAM disk in config.sys and put the pagefile on it. Limit of 32MB for a DOS RAM disk because we're in 16-bit land, but for Windows 98 that's fine. This was the kind of setup I always wanted back then, and it was nice to finally have it, but the good times stopped there.
Needless to say that the OS misbehaved constantly, with loads of BSODs and "This Application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" on Explorer.exe if you so much as looked at it sideways. No, it wasn't the RAM disk pagefile; putting it back to HD fixed nothing. The OS was just criminally unstable.
Next up was Visual Studio 6, and the first bad memory that came back to me was the lack of screen real-estate. Not being able to tuck away all the little workspace and build windows and have them pop back out on a mouse-over was really annoying. The project settings dialogs were shockingly bad, the debugger was appalling primitive, no tabbed environment, unfamiliar keyboard shortcuts, just nasty. None of these actually prevented me from working on code, but the overall cruddiness just gave an aura of bad vibes, and the awkwardness in usability severely impacted my productivity.
So I finally heaved a sigh and went with Visual Studio 2003 on Windows 2000. It can still do what I need, and the sheer quantum leap ahead in just about everything was a total relief.
Now, it annoys me when Linux Weenies make pronouncements about how bad Windows is in general, when - if you have half a brain - it's obvious that they're really only referring to old versions that don't even exist anymore. No, Windows is no longer based on DOS, and no, it no longer does co-operative multitasking, for example. But going back to how horrible that recent experience was, I did very much get the feeling that just about anything would have been an improvement.
Friday, March 19, 2010
I'd forgotten how horrible some old software was...
Posted by
mhquake
at
7:28 PM
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1 comments:
Wow. I still love 2000, and still use it. It's been a long, long time since I've experienced a BSOD, but I do remember them frequently in the 95/98 days. Good times!
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