Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT
- Reference: 1721212633
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/17/porting_the_windows_95_start/
- Source link:
While some might consider that Microsoft lost its way when it ditched Program Manager for the Windows 95 Start Menu, that early iteration represented a far more innocent world compared to what pops up when the Windows key is pressed in Windows 11.
Plummer, who worked on familiar parts of the Windows experience, such as Task Manager, had a hand in [1]porting the Start Menu from Windows 95 to Windows NT, with responsibility for what is painted on the screen when the menu pops up and running the selected program at end.
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[3]Youtube Video
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Naturally, Plummer is keen to give the lion's share of the credit for the Start Menu to the Windows 95 design team, but shared the tricks used to make the product name – Windows NT, 2000 Professional or whatever – turn up sideways on the menu without requiring a library of localized bitmaps: "You couldn't at that time draw sideways text," Plummer explained, "and you certainly couldn't in Windows 95."
"But could you do it on Windows NT? Well, not directly, but Windows NT provided something called Coordinate Transformations that allowed you to do things like rotate the entire device context. If you did that by 90 degrees and gave it the right Coordinate Transformations then you could magically draw into it and it would render it directly up."
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Which is how the product name appeared.
Plummer also spoke of the pain of moving from the NetBEUI networking stack of Windows 95 to the TCP/IP preferred by Windows NT. While the NetBEUI on Windows 95 had an instant time-out if the user misspelled a server name, things were different on NT where TCP/IP might spend 90 seconds waiting on a DNS query. Plummer was tasked with rewriting that part of the Start Menu to run asynchronously, so that the system would remain responsive while the networking stack waited to be told there was no such server.
[7]The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver
[8]Microsoft shows venerable and vulnerable NTLM security protocol the door
[9]Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit
[10]The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April
With credit to another Microsoft veteran, Raymond Chen, Plummer went on to explain an unfortunate side-effect of the asynchronous code. If you got the server right, but got the share name wrong, and kept on typing when entering the wrong share name, there would be a good chance that the server would decide it had received too many invalid requests and lock out the user.
"That was something we fixed well before ship," Plummer said, "but it was something we ran into internally once we had added this functionality."
Decades on, it is easy to be caught out by the consequences of asynchronous operation. However, the hack used – if it can be called that – to persuade the product name to appear sideways on the Start Menu in the name of efficiency is a delight.
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It is also a reminder of how far Microsoft has not come in its development of that key part of the Windows experience: the Start Menu. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://youtu.be/fr4Q6CF0E_8?si=6G-q5mZFnobd0YH_
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZpfqmoaeZABCR-KFSvpbgAAAAAQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://youtu.be/fr4Q6CF0E_8?si=6G-q5mZFnobd0YH_
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZpfqmoaeZABCR-KFSvpbgAAAAAQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZpfqmoaeZABCR-KFSvpbgAAAAAQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZpfqmoaeZABCR-KFSvpbgAAAAAQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/13/windows_3d_pipes_screensaver/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/microsoft_deprecates_ntlm/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/26/starting_over_rebooting_the_os/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/10/hobbes_os2_archive_shut_down/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZpfqmoaeZABCR-KFSvpbgAAAAAQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: userTransform("Stop Menu")
Also stops you in your tracks while you try and work out how to find whatever it was you wanted.
NetBEUI
Argh, that'll be PTSD-triggering for some
Re: NetBEUI
Never used it, used IPX instead
"the Windows Start Menu was a pure thing"
Definitely, I was working to try and get clinical users working well in the computing environment in the early days, most of them working with DEC PDP-11 computers via a terminal and no menus at all. Once the Windows Start Menu appeared everyone was able to move to the Windows computing world quickly and easily ... so many early clinical users were able to start creating their data analysis software in the Windows environment via the menu access, not having to look for a program on the hard disk directory.
The early Windows world made everything easy for people who had major interests outside the computing world but were suddenly able to start using it. Windows was originally designed well to be easy for everyone to use, A world that has died now.
Windows is one of those strange examples which demonstrates that sometimes UI can be designed better by engineers rather than usability "experts".
The NT / 2000 era was also the last in a time when UI was exciting and companies actually wanted to explore desktop processes. Quite sad this ended.
Have you any evidence that the later Start Menus were designed by experts to be usable? It seems more likely that they were designed to drive adoption of Microsoft services such as One Drive and Bing.
What I'm urging is caution against judging a whole professional field based upon something from Microsoft.
Microsoft is in such as state of chaos that I am not entirely sure that it was designed or implemented by "engineers" either to be quite honest.
I give Gnome 3 a hard time for being unusable but the fact that Microsoft already had something good and has regressed to such an extent is truely sad.
At least Gnome 3 had to regress due to mounting licensing pressures.
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html
(Full circle back to the one of the other Reg authors website ;)
The RISC OS menu
The Windows 95 user interface was cribbed from RISC OS. And it was good. Until Microsoft started messing with it later.
Re: The RISC OS menu
And RISC OS had no problems drawing text sideways, upside down, or whatever back in 1989ish (whenever the outline font manager was released; I used to softload it on RO2 for DTP use, it came built in to RO3).
unsullied by ads
Sit on the naughty step and never move .
Some of the girls at work have this nonsense on the stock control system. Out of nowhere a random, loud, video advert will pop up the front and play for thirty seconds and then go away. They seem to think this is normal, just a modern annoyance. If that happened on a machine that I bought, it would go back in its box and back to the vendor as being defective. Trust me, an autistic person deep in a coding session does not need those sorts of distractions. And if the vendor was unhelpful, I'd be rather tempted to seek satisfaction with the pointy end of my favourite pickaxe (yes, I have more than one, modern life is shit).
Re: While some might consider that Microsoft lost its way when it ditched Program Manager for the Windows 95 Start Menu, that early iteration represented a far more innocent world compared to what pops up when the Windows key is pressed in Windows 11.
Do you mean [1]Classic Shell ?
[1] http://www.classicshell.net/
userTransform("Stop Menu")
The modern version is called the "Stop Menu". It appears for you to stop your routine and contemplate what you will be consuming next. All that with the warm, welcome and hallucinatory artificial lullaby to sooth you into submission.