Hello everybody!

I'm looking for any either book(s) or article series about history of Windows (or development history) versions from 1.x-3.x to 95-98. I already have some like "Helen Custer - Windows NT Internals" (but its about early NT architecture), "Showstopper" (about early NT development) and "Amit Singh - A History of Apple’s Operating Systems" (as title says - history about AppleDOS->MacOS X development), but I haven't seen anything about 16-bit and 9x windows.

Does anybody knows something about writings like it? I would like to read it in English or Russian. Thanks for your replies!

The Andrew Schulman Undocumented * books are ok, with some insight. The undocumented 95 does have a great read about the rise of DPMI and the whole VXD / VMM kernel.

The Undocumented Windows 95 book even has some simple examples of how to take a 'tiny/small' memory model program and using DPMI run it in protected mode... good fun.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN= ... hulmanswA/

Well worth the $5 IMHO.

Ah, well, ok, big thanks for it!

To be more accurate, I more interested in articles like winhistory.de series or like this apple history, but more expanded, if it exist at all. But other stuff acceptable as well. Anyway thanks.

yeah that on windows is surprisingly hard to find in one consolidated thing. I think it's because of the delayed launch, no doubt filled with missteps.

I suppose if I were in the need of a sizable term paper, or thesis it'd make a great subject. Although Windows doesn't really get interesting until the forced premature launch of Windows/386 for Compaq. Microsoft's first 32bit anything, and how Windows/386 could do more in 1987 than OS/2 in 1988...

oh really? someone has written about that?

I'm interested in that, can you scan it for me?

Really worth the read is "In Search of Stupidity", by Merrill R. Chapman. Its subtitle is 'Over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters'.

It goes right back to DOS 1 days etc, the difference between MS-DOS clone computers and PC-DOS clone computers, and all sorts of lovely things one lived through, but have rather forgot.

In the early days, before successful copy of IBM's bios, there were MS-DOS clone computers, which ran MS-DOS, but the video access varied from machine to machine (eg why we have Tandy DOS and so forth). It was only when IBM clones started to dominate the market in DOS 4/5 days that we see the drift to IBM Compatible dominating over the MS-DOS clone-boxen (like Amstrad and Tandy)

It goes on rather intelligently through all sorts of things, and is really worth the read if one wants to put all of this software collection into historical prospective.

Not history as such and alittle bit out of your ranges but MS had some great stuff on the Burnlab in the windows 2000 era

http://bit.ly/oOa7zp
http://bit.ly/pW43lA

First one I have only in Russian, sorry. For second, look your PM.

PS. As I can remember, "Bill Gates - A road ahead" has some pieces of MS history too, if anyone interested except me.

It's actually Unauthorized Windows 95 (as opposed to Undocumented DOS). Infact, I have a copy of it, and it confirmed many points, some of which quite interesting, such as that not only was IFSMgr (Installable File System Manager) reused from Chicago in Snowball (Windows for Workgroups 3.11) for its 32-bit File Access, but also that it's possible to rename COMMAND.COM to KRNL386.EXE and run the low level portion of Windows using WIN386.EXE/DOS386.EXE/VMM32.VXD without the high level portion, resulting in a V86 (Virtual 86) mode-based MS-DOS.

That book is quite thorough, and lately, I've even tried to read it every night and every morning while in bed, however, it's a bit difficult to read every letter/charactor if it, since much of it also involves source code from various test programs and other such information.

Could you scan for me?

Yeah Infoworld had a writeup on it...

http://books.google.com/books?id=mDsEAA ... &q&f=false

now if only google could get Byte into their archives....!!!

I mean, Windows had been in the market place for three or four years by this point, gone through ten point releases and into its third version (1.0, 2.0, 2.1), by this point. Still, it wasn't the sort of thing one read about in the press. On the other hand, OS/2 was a forward looking system for new technologies. What is being compared here is something that's been out several versions and years against something that's quite new.

It is of course nifty to think that this user friendly OS has a nice chapter on how to edit win.ini and system.ini with edlin. OS/2 at least could run a full screen text editor E from the boot disks.

Windows 2.x was used heavily as a run-time libraries: programs that one started from DOS would load Windows libraries etc, rather than loading the default shell (msdos.exe). The less said of msdos.exe the better. Progman, Control, and Winfile come later: these derive from OS/2's PMEXEC, PMCPL and PMFILE.

You can, for a lark, load up the PMShell subsystem for Windows (3.x or 4.x), and then put the PMExec files from a real OS/2 1.3, and open it up. Got to love that DDEEXEC!

Yea, read that book last week. This book also clear states there's no much architecture differences between Win3.x and Win95. Nice!

Have you heard of The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows by Raymond Chen? It sounds like exactly what you want.

No, never heard about it. I will look for it, thanks!

I have read it some time ago he remembered a lot of funny stuff from development