Here is a piece of Windows trivia related to that old Microsoft building. In Windows 2.0, if one wanted to dereference a global handle (an opaque data type), one would search for the memory block named "Burgermaster" in the debugger. Then use the handle as an offset inside the memory block to find the physical pointer to the the memory referenced by the handle. People outside the company would ask why that was the name of the global handle table. It literally was on the sign the programmer saw when looking out their office window.
I had a child born at Group Health Redmond in 1985. Microsoft was still in the Northup Building next to Burgermaster but the new campus has been announced. My son was born at 5am. I stopped by Microsoft at 7:30am and emailed my group to say he was born and that I’d be late. I drove home (downtown Kirkland) and picked up my daughter and mother-in-law and headed back to the hospital. We visited him for a little while and then I got in to work about 11. I worked until about 7. No one suggested that I should take the day off. Back then you only got 1 week off in your first year and no time off in your first six months and I’d only been there about 4 months. Things were different!
By group health (which I usually think of as 156th) there was the Ridgewood Building that kind of looked like this but was reddish. It was where a lot of HQ sales support work was done from but a little later than that.
VB was a lifesaver for me. I prototyped the Word and PPT ruler in VB and sent the .exe to the dev to play with. He called me and asked that I come to his office. He said, "Designers only send me .bmp's...we need to talk." He had some cool ideas he wanted me to prototype (like holding the alt-key while dragging the arrows to reveal dimensions) and he knew I could do it faster than he could. BTW...My design mimic'ed the physical tab-stops on a typewriter. Don Norman praised them as an example of leveraging real world affordances in the digital world. Not so true any more. But in 1992, Microsoft receptionists still had IBM Selectric's sitting next to them! 😮
Hey Steven, just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying reading this. As someone less than 5 years into my career, it's great to hear your perspective on things and hear what lessons have meant a lot to you, especially at the beginning of your career at Microsoft. Look forward to the upcoming chapters!
Great reading as always Steven! I would have loved some more details on how you dealt with the problem of having a reliable IDE under Win16, but maybe it was still "just" App Studio, and then the rest (compiler, debugger) was just running in console?
I remember that my first copy of Visual C++ 4 (32 bit) came bundled with a copy of 16-bit VC++ 1.52c
What amazes me looking behind is that Win 3.x had such a short timespan! Maybe it's because I cut my teeth as a teenager programmer in Win 3.x and only later in Win95, but it seemed so much longer! It's incredible to look back and see that effectively the golden years of Win16 were just a short 5 years (90-95), but it had such a huge impact. Win16 applications were everywhere, they have been used and supported for decades. Also, I cannot believe how mature the Win32 API is now. It has been there, basically unchanged but only evolved, for almost 30 years now. Wow.
It was so much clever engineering (I did not work on that part). We had a VXD and a bunch of code that was from the old programmers workbench and then some clever ways to shuffle data in and out of a Windows app from those low level driver-like modules. Crazy stuff!
It is instructive to look at the pace of releases. Windows 3 was 1990, then 3.1 an 3.11, and then 95 came out in August 1995. So there was really only 5 years of selling new 16 bit systems. But the tail was long...it took a little bit to get non-connected PCs to move to Windows 95 where the connectivity was a real impetus for upgrades/new PCs.
As usually thanks a lot for sharing this story Steven. Loved your blogposts at work, loved your "One Strategy", and love this book. It's invaluable to get a look into how Microsoft built its empire around Windows.
Here is a piece of Windows trivia related to that old Microsoft building. In Windows 2.0, if one wanted to dereference a global handle (an opaque data type), one would search for the memory block named "Burgermaster" in the debugger. Then use the handle as an offset inside the memory block to find the physical pointer to the the memory referenced by the handle. People outside the company would ask why that was the name of the global handle table. It literally was on the sign the programmer saw when looking out their office window.
Burgermaster is still there. Microsoft is not.
But was Burgermaster on speeddial? :-)
I’m sure it was for some people... cheese burger and a diet cherry coke sound familiar??
Is that the building that was next to Group Health (in which I worked in ‘85)?
I had a child born at Group Health Redmond in 1985. Microsoft was still in the Northup Building next to Burgermaster but the new campus has been announced. My son was born at 5am. I stopped by Microsoft at 7:30am and emailed my group to say he was born and that I’d be late. I drove home (downtown Kirkland) and picked up my daughter and mother-in-law and headed back to the hospital. We visited him for a little while and then I got in to work about 11. I worked until about 7. No one suggested that I should take the day off. Back then you only got 1 week off in your first year and no time off in your first six months and I’d only been there about 4 months. Things were different!
I am not sure. This building was along 520 at the intersection of Northup Way and 108th Ave NE.
By group health (which I usually think of as 156th) there was the Ridgewood Building that kind of looked like this but was reddish. It was where a lot of HQ sales support work was done from but a little later than that.
Yeah, that’s it.
VB was a lifesaver for me. I prototyped the Word and PPT ruler in VB and sent the .exe to the dev to play with. He called me and asked that I come to his office. He said, "Designers only send me .bmp's...we need to talk." He had some cool ideas he wanted me to prototype (like holding the alt-key while dragging the arrows to reveal dimensions) and he knew I could do it faster than he could. BTW...My design mimic'ed the physical tab-stops on a typewriter. Don Norman praised them as an example of leveraging real world affordances in the digital world. Not so true any more. But in 1992, Microsoft receptionists still had IBM Selectric's sitting next to them! 😮
I have some fun VB prototypes later for Pogo :-) Dean prototyped AutoCorrect in VB as well!
Hey Steven, just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying reading this. As someone less than 5 years into my career, it's great to hear your perspective on things and hear what lessons have meant a lot to you, especially at the beginning of your career at Microsoft. Look forward to the upcoming chapters!
Steve - need the On to 014 link to be active (not so on Safari)
Great reading as always Steven! I would have loved some more details on how you dealt with the problem of having a reliable IDE under Win16, but maybe it was still "just" App Studio, and then the rest (compiler, debugger) was just running in console?
I remember that my first copy of Visual C++ 4 (32 bit) came bundled with a copy of 16-bit VC++ 1.52c
What amazes me looking behind is that Win 3.x had such a short timespan! Maybe it's because I cut my teeth as a teenager programmer in Win 3.x and only later in Win95, but it seemed so much longer! It's incredible to look back and see that effectively the golden years of Win16 were just a short 5 years (90-95), but it had such a huge impact. Win16 applications were everywhere, they have been used and supported for decades. Also, I cannot believe how mature the Win32 API is now. It has been there, basically unchanged but only evolved, for almost 30 years now. Wow.
It was so much clever engineering (I did not work on that part). We had a VXD and a bunch of code that was from the old programmers workbench and then some clever ways to shuffle data in and out of a Windows app from those low level driver-like modules. Crazy stuff!
It is instructive to look at the pace of releases. Windows 3 was 1990, then 3.1 an 3.11, and then 95 came out in August 1995. So there was really only 5 years of selling new 16 bit systems. But the tail was long...it took a little bit to get non-connected PCs to move to Windows 95 where the connectivity was a real impetus for upgrades/new PCs.
Thank you for the comment!
As usually thanks a lot for sharing this story Steven. Loved your blogposts at work, loved your "One Strategy", and love this book. It's invaluable to get a look into how Microsoft built its empire around Windows.
thank you! 🙏