Larry Osterman - His one interaction with Bill Gates (over DOS networking stack) | TheChannel9Team

mwirth

Aaah yes. Looking forward to interviews with Bert Keely. I remember his presentation at the tablet pc launch event. I think it was outstanding.

dotnetjunkie

Beer28, I think you're completely missing the point. One fairly small (you can't say that 20MB is a lot!) runtime is enough for all your windows software, no matter what language they are written in! That's just what is so fantastic about .NET. In the old days, users needed a runtime for VB programs, another one for C++, Java, etc... It was one big, uncontrollable mess. Remember DLL hell? .NET Framework solves all these problems, one neat runtime for everything, that is cleanly installed under its own folder, and makes management and deployment SOOO much easier. And it is shipped with the system in W2K3, and will be in future client versions as well (and by the way, lots of people have already downloaded it from Windows Update, even when they don't know what it is).

Really, the .NET Framework is a blessing for us developers!

andyandy

Beer28 wrote:
I just can't believe that Bill freaked out about 60k and now he innondates developers with a 20 meg virtual machine to replace the appx 5 meg java vm or msvbvm6 with when it wasn't even distributed with service packs, and wants everybody to develop on it and act like that's the normal way to develop instead of using C++ and long lasting binary code libraries.

It's not that bad Smiley

The 20mb you need to download contains various compilers etc. He could freak out because of the quite huge working set of a .NET app, but since they're working on reducing that, maybe he's freaked out already Tongue Out

.

For comparison, my Java Runtime folder (%PROGRAMFILES%\Java\j2re1.4.2_05) takes up 34MB. Can't remember how big the download file was...

prompt

This is the essence of true creativity and dedication to the art of software design. Mr. Osterman is still developing for a company that you can tell he loves and wants to maintain a legacy with. Truly an inspiration.

earnshaw
Jack Sleeps

Supposing the 60K for LAN Manager was permanently resident in memory: that would be almost 10% of the machine's physical memory for an OS component. That is a serious reduction in space available for user programs. Come to think of it, when IBM designed the PC in about 1982, they figured nobody would ever make an application that would need that much memory. Then the desktop computer adopted all of the generally accepted principles of mainframe design (paged virtual memory, multiple CPUs) and adopted a few more (graphical user interface, object-oriented programming) and the problem went away. In his way, Bill was right to complain. The machine wasn't up to the task of handling LAN Manager.

LarryOsterman

earnshaw wrote:

Supposing the 60K for LAN Manager was permanently resident in memory: that would be almost 10% of the machine's physical memory for an OS component. That is a serious reduction in space available for user programs. Come to think of it, when IBM designed the PC in about 1982, they figured nobody would ever make an application that would need that much memory. Then the desktop computer adopted all of the generally accepted principles of mainframe design (paged virtual memory, multiple CPUs) and adopted a few more (graphical user interface, object-oriented programming) and the problem went away. In his way, Bill was right to complain. The machine wasn't up to the task of handling LAN Manager.

That's exactly right - and that's why Bill freaked.

I was talking to Valorie at dinner tonight, I'll write up how I got the DOS redirector down to 128 bytes at some point in the near future.

TheProgrammer
Always on edge thinking...

Larry, so did you managed to make it small than 60K? Or was the product was not shipped at all?

Oh, I have one question to ask. Do you declare the namespace std globally? That means, do you do:

using namespace std;

or

using::string;
using::setw;
using::cout;
using::cin;

or

std::string a = "String";
std::cout << a << std::endl;

Thanks

Lwatson
One ugly mug...

Beer28 wrote:
I wouldn't worry about it. Bosses always try to act like what ever they did "in the day" was god like compared to what employees are doing. I've had it happen to me as well.

I'll have to keep that in mind since I am now the grizzlebeard of the bunch and often muse about past goings on 'In The Day'

Beer28 wrote:
I don't have anything against .NET, don't get me wrong. I won't use it over C++ and standard libraries either, but I don't have anything against it other than it's huge and it's not shipped with the system. I'm not posting this to be inflamatory either.

I agree that being shipped with the system would be a giant step in the right direction. I agree that a fresh winxp build takes 3 or 4 trips to the update site to bring in-line with 20+megs of patches before even getting to the runtime. That said the benefits of Managed code development over C++ talking to COM or even MFC are just far to great to be ignored on the basis of ( If it aint in the box I won't use it ). Simply put its just another requirement to have this on your machine to run that. Is it a pain in the posterior? Absolutely. Is it worth that pain? The answer is once again Absolutely.

Being upset about 60k being used up back then for something like a network stack, read as (Your are saying that My lotus spreadsheet wont load up any more because I can now get a file from that machine over there?, without getting out of my seat) Guess what? Everybody would just continue to get up out of their seat and go and get the files via the good old sneaker net. Anyone who thinks otherwise never had to futz around with memory managers on a real mode dos env just to get some stupid game to run for little Joey, or do the same thing just to get some bloated beyond usability spreadsheet to load up for Joey's Dad...

dotnetjunkie

Beer28 wrote:
20 MB is alot for somebody on 56k.

Of course it's a lot for someone on 56k, but do you really know a single person still using 56k? 5 years ago this would have been an issue, but now literally everyone has broadband, even the most sporadic web users... In the country where I live every home has cable, and broadband internet over cable or ADSL is so damn cheap, that nobody would even consider still using a modem because that is charged by the minute, and even light users are doing profit with taking ADSL... (in fact, there is one provider offering completely free ADSL too (just normal telephone charges); and that includes a free ADSL modem!).

Of course I don't know where you live, but really, I don't know a single person still using a modem in our country (and I know lots of people).