Talking Bollocks

Microsoft Windows is still crap after all these years!

Remember when we used to use Windows 3.1? Remember how crap it was and how it couldn’t mutlitask? They said “Wait. We’re developing Windows New Technology. It will be great. It will multitask and it will keep applications apart so that if one crashes the others will carry one.”

Remember? So we waited, didn’t we. We stayed with Microsoft. We spurned IBMs OS2. We ignored Apple mac. We ignored the Comodore Amiga would is still the best multitasking system I know of. And Microsoft brought out Windows NT 3.5. It was a bit flaky but it was better than Windows 3.1. And they brought out Windows NT 4.0 and it looked pretty spiffy. We thought we were catching up with Apple mac. But it still froze when it had network issues. So we waited and we waited and we waited. And Apple rewrote their whole OS, taking a unix variant as the basics and retain the old API. And we continued to wait.

So here we are in 2009 with Windows XP.

I was working with computers when Bill Gates was in short trousers. My first OS was RSTS on a PDP11. That could multitask with 96K of RAM.

There is something very basic about computers. They consist of a few fundemental components:

· At least one processor
· Some Random Access Memory to hold what we’re working on
· Some long term storage, like a disk drive, to save everything and maybe do some swapping of RAM
· Peripherals. eg network cards etc.

It is the operating system’s job to sit between all this stuff and the user’s program and allocate time and resources to the program.

There can be only one reason that a properly functioning application should slow down or stop: A bottleneck. One of the components is overworked. Either the processor is being hogged or the RAM is full etc.

However. When we use a Microsoft operating system there is a second reason and that is that the operating system is poorly written. Even after maybe 20 years of writing operating systems Microsoft still cannot handle the basic task of supplying resources to user programs.

Here we have an example: I’m running a program which freezes. OK, maybe the program is poorly written. But it is only hogging one of the cores in my dual core machine. There is no shortage of RAM and the disk is not being thrashed. So why is the Windows shell incapable of refreshing my desktop? There can be only one answer: Because it was written by Microsoft.

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Microsoft have held the computing industry back 20 years – Discuss