I'm glad you called out Duane Campbell as having both a big brain and a big heart. My experience was he wasn't alone. I'm thinking of you, Jon DeVaan. There was a humanity that pervaded many early 'Office folks' that rubbed off on even more. Kind, patient, and whip-smart. Not a bad combination.
Windows 3.0 was a huge breakthrough for app developers. Windows 2 was hamstrung by the 1mb RAM limit of MS-DOS. There were memory expansion kits available like the Intel AboveBoard(tm) (a little marketing of complexity for you, as "AboveBoard" meant 4 64k segments of memory above the 640k limit and IO commands that mapped up to 4mb of RAM into those 4 segments). With Windows 3.0 there was ample memory, all addressed using the 16 bit segment and index registers of the Intel architecture. It gave a lot of space for apps to grow in capabilities in theory up to 16mb. PCs could start to deliver on their promise of "real" apps and running more than one app at a time (although that didn't really happen until Windows 95). The biggest problem Excel has was it had a few algorithms that did "peek ahead reads" that worked fine in real mode but in protected mode all of those speculative reads became memory protection faults. Those changes were the meat of Excel 2.1c. ChrisP (Chris Peters) also added the 3D look for the row and column headers.
There was an infamous company meeting presentation by Jeff Raikes during this period that relates to the, "What Intel gives, Microsoft takes away." The movie Top Gun was just released and mocking the movie poster, Jeff said, "I feel the need for speed!" Then he went on to declare that our strategy was, "cycle sucking software." As a developer I never appreciated that presentation.
I recall that under Windows 2 and/or 3 there were special undocumented Windows APIs especially for Excel for memory management. We tried to use them but to the best of my recollection your app had to be called Excel.exe for it to work so we could never use them.
When you talk about Systems I remember early days visiting Microsoft and hearing “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run”. And I noticed after hearing that, how future MS DOS releases would keep breaking Lotus 123. Funny to think about now.
I’ve heard you mention Apps vs Systems and how each group was very different (Systems having the experienced executives). Jeff Raikes, Brad Silverberg etc would fall into the experienced executives I’m guessing. Was there always a division then where you could never feel an equal against the people in this group - and similarly ‘they’ (big generalisation) never valued the work of Apps? at least not for a while anyway
There’s an interesting duality here Steven where you paint the picture of things being really quite disorganised and a little ‘shoot from the hip’ inside Microsoft, however from the outside it was a behemoth that could do no wrong and was firing on all cylinders. Was this true and was this incongruence hard to handle?
I'm glad you called out Duane Campbell as having both a big brain and a big heart. My experience was he wasn't alone. I'm thinking of you, Jon DeVaan. There was a humanity that pervaded many early 'Office folks' that rubbed off on even more. Kind, patient, and whip-smart. Not a bad combination.
Windows 3.0 was a huge breakthrough for app developers. Windows 2 was hamstrung by the 1mb RAM limit of MS-DOS. There were memory expansion kits available like the Intel AboveBoard(tm) (a little marketing of complexity for you, as "AboveBoard" meant 4 64k segments of memory above the 640k limit and IO commands that mapped up to 4mb of RAM into those 4 segments). With Windows 3.0 there was ample memory, all addressed using the 16 bit segment and index registers of the Intel architecture. It gave a lot of space for apps to grow in capabilities in theory up to 16mb. PCs could start to deliver on their promise of "real" apps and running more than one app at a time (although that didn't really happen until Windows 95). The biggest problem Excel has was it had a few algorithms that did "peek ahead reads" that worked fine in real mode but in protected mode all of those speculative reads became memory protection faults. Those changes were the meat of Excel 2.1c. ChrisP (Chris Peters) also added the 3D look for the row and column headers.
I don't know if your email analytics are telling you this, but I for one am devouring every post
There was an infamous company meeting presentation by Jeff Raikes during this period that relates to the, "What Intel gives, Microsoft takes away." The movie Top Gun was just released and mocking the movie poster, Jeff said, "I feel the need for speed!" Then he went on to declare that our strategy was, "cycle sucking software." As a developer I never appreciated that presentation.
I recall that under Windows 2 and/or 3 there were special undocumented Windows APIs especially for Excel for memory management. We tried to use them but to the best of my recollection your app had to be called Excel.exe for it to work so we could never use them.
When you talk about Systems I remember early days visiting Microsoft and hearing “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run”. And I noticed after hearing that, how future MS DOS releases would keep breaking Lotus 123. Funny to think about now.
I’ve heard you mention Apps vs Systems and how each group was very different (Systems having the experienced executives). Jeff Raikes, Brad Silverberg etc would fall into the experienced executives I’m guessing. Was there always a division then where you could never feel an equal against the people in this group - and similarly ‘they’ (big generalisation) never valued the work of Apps? at least not for a while anyway
There’s an interesting duality here Steven where you paint the picture of things being really quite disorganised and a little ‘shoot from the hip’ inside Microsoft, however from the outside it was a behemoth that could do no wrong and was firing on all cylinders. Was this true and was this incongruence hard to handle?
Do you have a perspective on the “IQ as currency” model vs current-day MSFTs emphasis on Growth Mindset?