Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit, Version 1.03 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit, Version 1.03

os2museum.com

27 pointsskissane12 comments

I actually have the Windows SDK v3.1 factory sealed in the basement. This thing is a beast. That box is a cube.

Your basement (particularly those reference manuals) look[s] very interesting.

Section 7 of the Programmer's Reference is the stuff of nightmares:

"This chapter describes the Cmacro macros, a set of assembly-language macros that can be used with the Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) to create assembly-language Windows applications."

MS-DOS macro assemblers were quite powerful, thanks to their macro languages, you could program almost in an pseudo high level language.

Once I ported something to GNU as and was quite surprised how bare bones it was.

Not to mention that I hope never to write AT&T syntax ever again.

Yeah, Microsoft's macro assembler (MASM) is still quite popular in some circles.

... okay, most of those circles are probably people writing cracks and game cheats.

The demoscene is another big one.

You're right. The code example given in the ancient Windows manual for an assembly "bitblt" function seems kind of reasonable, thanks to the macros.

The thing that gives me the most shudders is the weird memory models (small, middle, large, compact, huge?) and all that manual management of those funky x86 registers.

Actually since I am old enough to know x86 Assembly since 8086, that way of programming feels natural to me.

I have tried to play with ARM Assembly, just for fun, and it isn't the same thing.

It's amazing how much of this remained consistent over time. The birth of the windows event loop, resources, even windows hooks started here.

Sites like the OS2 Museum makes me really frustrated that companies don't make their old operating system software freely available for download. I feel like there is a lot of lost history due to this.

I remember reading in a book about Windows 1.0 (I think it was) using a "fast mode" method of loading libraries from .ovl files, versus a "slow mode" of individual DLLs, which is the method still used in Windows today.

Is anyone aware of more information on this history?

Microsoft should make such a site.

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