AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition
zapread.com
zapread.com
Microsoft is hiring!
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120311005018/http://www.seattl...
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/01/business/compressed-data-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20121026013653/http://www.seattl...
[On a side note, not answering the question is rather weird, and I can't imagine that this person stayed for long in the company. The only sane answer seems to be "Of course not" + explanation why you came up with the topic.]
1. The interpretation I choose for this article may not be the same as every other reader. Correctly or incorrectly, I believe that this company did not need to do much in order to continue to generate revenue once the Windows monopoly was established. The NYT article perhaps supports this idea. Microsoft could afford to be behind the curve on innovation, as the author suggests they were in the article. Rather than compete, Gates could simply focus on stifling any competition. Aside from its focus on thwarting competitors by any means necessary, Microsoft could afford to be wasteful. Much of the time spent and work done by employees like the author could very well be irrelevant to the continued success of the company, with no material effect. Time could be "wasted", so long as competition was blocked.
The other point is that there may be some folks who would not want to work for a company with a CEO who behaves like the one in the incident described. Sometimes these are clues about the company culture. Thus, this quote might have meaning to some people, but not to others who are normalised to this type of behaviour.
"DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run".
It was an old pre-Windows joke saying, maybe appealing because it didn't seem totally outside the realm of possibility, given other things people saw and heard from MS.
Later variations on the theme came with early Windows, when MS's own application programs were said to get special development support and also undocumented APIs they could use. Supposedly, this gave MS's programs time-to-market, stability, and performance advantages on MS's platform, to unseat previous dominant apps like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Then there seemed to be a later phase of MS, when any kind of competition or partnership with them came with the explicit question of what your exit strategy was, when MS decided to either buy you or stab you in the back.
And lots of complaints from customers over the barrel.
That environment was great for adoption of Linux and for moving some kinds of things to the Web.
I think MS isn't currently one of our biggest problems.
Whether ruthless underhandedness is irrevocably in the DNA of the MS corporation, perhaps laying dormant until they reach a leverage threshold, or with much better public perception management for maneuverings now, I don't know. I certainly hope that they've mellowed out, and are just a typical large corporation.
Not to diss engineering people there. I don't suspect that engineering there was ever much in on any underhandedness in business dealings.
Microsoft has over $100 billion in cash reserves and their OS near monopoly in many computing areas. It's going to take quite a lot of internal heroism to prevent them from using their position as an advantage. Maybe. But probably nothing will stop it.
Look at gaming. Recently got a Windows laptop. When I initially set it up it asked if I wanted Xbox Game Pass with a ton of games for $10 per month. Who can pass that up? Now they have a deal with EA. I am not a big gamer. Now it seems silly for me to buy more stuff on Steam when I haven't touched most of the stuff on Game Pass.
The basic concept seems obvious to me. Anytime you have a private corporation controlling a platform, it's not going to be fair. See also Google, Amazon, etc.
But thankfully we are making progress on decentralized platforms.
Are we? Curious what progress you see.
Matrix is federating chat, with Mozilla, Gitter and numerous others natively using the Matrix protocol. Meanwhile, there are dozens of mature bridges to pull in IRC, Slack, Discord, etc so you no longer have to install their software: https://matrix.org/bridges/
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Google does this a lot too - and usually, when they do it, everything's Free anyway so nobody cares right away. Chrome has basically ended the development of any competing browsing engine by proposing so many standards extensions that only Google's outsized staff could implement them. WebKit survives purely by mandate of the iOS App Store, and Firefox is basically funded by Google anyway. This is arguably more effective EE&E than Microsoft was able to do with Internet Explorer.
(Side note: the whole Oracle/Google lawsuit is basically Oracle trying to litigate EE&E of Java out of existence. This is part of the reason why I can't fully condemn it. If it's wrong for Microsoft to add new class libraries to their own JVM, then it's also wrong for Google to do the same thing. I'd rather live in a world where we can reimplement proprietary extensions, than one where every Free standard has copyright litigation risk associated with it.)
That's not exclusive, but they pretty much coined the term and made it in a viable business practice to undermine competition in the most dirty way.
No, that predates Microsoft by well over a hundred years in the corporate sphere just in the US. They're not remotely close to being the dirtiest at it historically.
If anyone doesn't understand that, go read the history of Standard Oil, US Steel, GM & Ford, or a dozen other giants that have ruled the US economic landscape at one time or another. Walmart has competed as dirty as anything Microsoft has ever done, the same goes for Amazon, Google and Facebook more recently.
The Wikipedia article for AARD code explains the source:
> The name was derived from Microsoft programmer Aaron R. Reynolds (1955–2008),[7] who used "AARD" to sign his work; "AARD" was found in the machine code of the installer.
Other places where you stumble across the name include e.g. FAT32 which has a filesystem information sector[1] in the hidden region after the boot sector which includes similar signatures (AaRR and aArr, byte swapped to little endian of course).
[1] https://wiki.osdev.org/FAT32#FSInfo_Structure_.28FAT32_only....
Maybe my understanding of endianness is off but isn’t it AaRR -> RRAa?
Something appears to be missing between the history and the conclusion. However the competition was finished off, it wasn't by code that was never used.
It was used in the beta:
When a user ran Windows 3.1 Beta on his computer using DR-DOS he was horrified when the system informed him of a "non-fatal error".
IIRC an explanation for this that I read was that the beta release was given to outside testers and journalists writing about it in computer magazines. Some of those journalists would try to run it on DR DOS, get the intimidating error message and be very helpful in spreading the rumor that it doesn't work properly on DR DOS. The final release would work of course and not have a "smoking gun" in it, but the rumor is out there. The later part obviously failed by only disabling, but not removing the code.
On the other hand of the spectrum you have explanations like the one on Larry Osterman's blog, that this was all for compatibility, because early Windows and the DOS underneath would have to interoperate closely and Microsoft would take the blame if anything didn't work properly[1]. Which by the way is also the reason for gems like [2], which could also be re-interpreted as trying to weed out MS DOS clones.
Of course, the first one is only hearsay because I can't track down the source right now, and BOTH statements are from people who also have a stake here, but on opposing sides, so please take both with a grain of salt. It is not necessary that one side is blatantly lying (or falsely accusing). There can easily be truth to both here, with the "compatibility checks" done for semi valid engineering reasons while also having the desired side effect that management wants of making the competition look bad.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman...
Why would a user do that, and why should I be mad if they did?
It would be more accurate to say DOS is an overlay on Windows 95, once Windows 95 has booted. The DOS façade may be so convincing that the OS seems to be running on DOS, but that's the exact opposite of the truth: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
Microsoft could have let people install DR-DOS on Windows 95; DR-DOS is similar enough to MS DOS for the magic to work. But it would have sucked for the end user if they had to buy a second OS to use old apps and drivers, and it's hard to say what the user would gain. The fancy multi-tasking features of DR-DOS presumably wouldn't work while Windows was running, for example.
Fun thing I discovered once is that after you shut down, the screen that says “it’s now safe to turn off your computer” actually hosts a hidden dos prompt and you can start windows again by typing “win”
Stac electronics made some software (Stacker) which compressed your files on the fly, it was very popular in the early 90s, as it could massively increase the amount of non-program space you had on your 40MB hard drive, if 30M was used for applicaitons/OS and 10M for documents, it would give you another 20-40MB of space, tripping or more the free space you had.
The program sold for something like $100-200 a copy, but as a 40M hard drive was nearer $1k this was a bargain. Stac Electronics was valued as $12/share at the time.
Microsoft saw this, and wanted it. So they sent in their lawyers to make Stac electronics an offer they couldn't refuse. License Stacker to Microsoft and get paid $0.00 down, and $0.00 per copy.
Stac refused the generous microsoft offer, so Microsoft copied {or bought from another company which had copied} their technology (infringing Stac's patents) and bundled it with Dos 6, something called "DoubleSpace" (it was also a buggy implementation).
Drive compression was important at this time. Gates wore a t-shirt with "We came, we saw, we doubled" on at the Dos 6 launch - it's amazing to think now, but 30 years ago every byte counted, Stac's software saved people a fortune in hardware costs, and the killer feature of dos 6 was compression.
Stac's share price collapsed from $12 to $3 practically overnight.
Microsoft were sued, and they lost. They had to pay about $5 per copy of Dos that had been sold to Stac. Dos 6.21 was released which removed Doublespace, and 6.22 reimplemented the technology as 'drivespace'. This eventually came down a little during appeals when the companies settled out of court (there was a more minor case against Stac for using trade secrets), Stac got about $90m in the end.
Either way, Stac was dead. They fought Microsoft, and despite winning the battle, they lost the war. Stac dissolved in 2002.
> Microsoft BASIC was patterned very closely on BASIC-PLUS. [...] The ability to place logical and loop commands in-line, like I = I + 1 UNTIL I = 10 was not copied over and does not appear on any common version of microcomputer BASIC. MS BASIC also lacked the matrix commands.
I seriously doubt you'd find any copyrighted commonality in the implementation.
> The timing of Gates's leave [from Harvard] could appear suspect since it came on the heels of a disciplinary hearing with college administrators. An auditor from the Defense Department discovered how much time Gates had spent programming on the PDP-10 computer, which was provided by the U.S. government, and began to ask questions. Gates's explanations were flimsy: first, he was doing work for his own company, and, second, some of that outside work was carried out by Allen, who wasn't a student. The records of the Gates disciplinary hearing are sealed, but accounts say that the punishment fell short of his being asked to leave… Gates, who as nineteen years old at the time, made his case in the club's newsletter, which published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the January-February 1976 issue… Furthermore, there was the computer time, whose "value" exceeded $40,000, Gates informed the hobbyists. This odd phrasing jumped out to some readers, even before people learned of Gates's reliance on Harvard's computers. Gates wasn't claiming that Micro-Soft had spent $40,000 for the computer time, which it needed to recoup; rather, it had obtained that time somehow. Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the "theft" of a version of a program [BASIC] that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using "borrowed" time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government.
p. 73
Worth watching if you have 20 minutes.
Integrate, extend, extinguish.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603860.Undocumented_DOS
I'd already done a little reverse engineering, writing a simple "undelete" utility for MS-DOS 3.3, etc, but that book opened my eyes to a lot of the hidden complexity in DOS.
Gary Kildall RIP.
Most billionaires are also philantropists because they donate sizable amounts of money to different causes. This helps them maintain a favorable public image. It is also a social activity that helps you build relationships with other wealthy people.
Bill Gates does have a bona fide foundation that works on important problems and his approach to solving those problems seems reasonably effective. He is an avid reader and reads hundreds of books per year. He is an interesting person, I enjoy his talks, etc...
But Microsoft is a different story. Behind every Microsoft key product there's some deceiving business deal.
- MS-DOS: Misleading deal involving 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products
- Windows: Misleading deal involving developing software for the Apple Macintosh
- Windows NT: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with IBM to develop OS/2
- SQL Server: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with Sybase to develop Sybase SQL Server
And the list goes on and on and on.
In addition to the AARD code many other things happened. Linux was called cancer, there were fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns against OpenGL, against Linux, against many open source projects. Open source communities got pissed off, developers got pissed off, and that started slowly hurting Microsoft. So now they have decided to co-exist with open source.
This isn't sarcasm, by the way; I'm genuinely conflicted.
“Bill Gates .. was such a thoughtful developer, e.g., autmatically overwriting MBRs installed by other OS with a Microsoft MBR, and making it impossible to boot Windows from partitions other than the first one, in case you accidentally tried to boot another OS from partition one."
I recently bought a brand-new desktop PC after the other one gave up the ghost after eight years of service. After disabling Secure Boot and enabling legacy USB. The PC rebooted with a BIOS Corrupt error. Requiring a recovery of the original BIOS.
So now I'm stuck on this innovative “Windows 10” desktop that is as slow as molasses and the harddrive is continually churning running background process that don't do anything.
I already have an SSD, I was planning on installing it and using the harddrive as an archive. Then adding some extra RAM and an M.2 memory card.
> On July 6, 1994 Kildall, 52, walked into a Monterey bar. He was wearing motorcycle leathers with Harley-Davidson patches;a would-be biker. There were some real bikers in the bar. Something was said. There was pushing and shoving, and Kildall died from injuries sustained to his head. An inquest called the death “suspicious,” but no one was charged.
That's interesting to me, because when I was in grade school, they were pushing Logo, and I didn't like it at all. It wasn't presented as doing much more than ordering a turtle around though.
It seems like it's gotten less comfortable slyly mock crappy realities and I think that's a shame.