What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)

codersnotes.com

177 pointsedgarvm126 comments

Having worked at MSN during this time, I can tell you, the jealousy of AOL and the client-based walled garden they built was almost physically palpable. AOL was the onramp to the internet for so many folks, but many felt they didn't need to leave the garden. MSN was kind of a halfway spot: a bit more open, but also more integrated into Windows (standard embrace and extend approach). Yahoo! was the other big worry: also had a dialup option, but basically was the internet for many, in that, as a portal, it safely met many of their needs for info and communication.

You saw some of this stuff live on as ActiveX objects in IE for a few years after the client wound down; MSN Money was the last big holdout with it's portfolio manager and charting engine, which also was released as part of a Quicken competitor for personal finance management called Microsoft Money.

When I started out at Activision there was a guy doing research so that we would be ready for when Microsoft Network rolled out. It did seem like a cooler version of AOL to us that had like APIs. But no one thought it was going to make it.

We were at ATVI together, then our paths crossed again at 7Studios, and if you haven't moved recently, you live about 4 miles from me. Small world.

One nitpick: Microsoft Money was around since the early '90s, long before MSN showed up. I also miss it very much.

Right, Money was around for a while, but it had no investor portfolio tooling for a while. They tried a couple of things, but eventually just used the ActiveX object to give them "insta-portfolio!".

Money was pretty impressive: easier to use than Quicken, but powerful in a lot of places that Quicken just struggled. Quicken couldn't figure out if it was an accounting package or a personal finance tool, while Money (and a few others) drilled down on real money solutions. My wife was a holdout for a long time as well, asking me to find ways to keep it running on each new system I installed in the house.

Microsoft Money Sunset Edition still works. I can still download all my credit card statements in OFX (MS Money format). I use it weekly and have nearly 20 years of transaction history stored there.

I have no idea what I'll do if it ever stops working.

The killer feature I would switch instantly for is a way to automatically set part ownership of a joint account. I want to download credit card transactions and mark them as being 1/2 mine, so it doesn't throw off my budget tracking.

This feature does not exist in any financial software, sadly.

Still using MSMoney Sunset Edition. My records only go back to 2003 (19 years). I like having my financial information directly on my computer, under my control, and not being mined by random start-ups that get acquired.

I've been msmoneying since 1998. The file has it all and still works amazingly well. Many banks still support the formats and yeah, it is completely offline which is how I like it.

> but also more integrated into Windows

that's right. iirc the windows 95 ppp drivers were a separate package and msn included them along with a custom dialer that integrated directly into the shell as a tray application?

I recall NetWits, a multiplayer 1950s-style quiz show game on MSN where you played as a contestant against other MSN subscribers in real-time (there was a scheduled "broadcast time" every weeknight -- couldn't play at any other time). There were real prizes, like trips from Expedia.

Here's a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyje8xlGc9Q

Truly a product of its time, but they really tried to experiment with multimedia (at least in MSN 2.0). I think there was an online version of Encarta and a bunch of other things that I've since forgotten.

That's awesome! I have very fond memories of playing 1 vs 100 on Xbox Live and was sad when they canned it.

https://youtu.be/ssWZhHBeNVQ

Definitely a forgotten program. Another one from that era (that actually survived until Win 10 I just learned) is the "Briefcase". It was basically a primitive file syncing tool for multiple devices.

The Briefcase was a godsend back when removable storage was used to move files between computers and there was no other way to keep things synced. It's a shame they removed it.

You could always just build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

;)

Certainly more reliable than dropbox

Back when? :) Putting things on a flash drive and plugging it elsewhere is still the best/easiest way to move files in many situations.

Think floppier...

Never used Briefcase. I just remember being confused by it as a kid. I did, however, use Iomega Zip Drives to move large (at the time) files.

The briefcase was for situations where you'd have local copies of many smaller files, and wanted to keep the files up-to-date between multiple computers. Back in '95 it wasn't uncommon for multiple employees, pupils or family members to share a small number of computers. Many homes had none. Working straight against the floppy was too slow, but syncing everything with the briefcase once you were done would speed up the workflow.

What could it do that onedrive cannot do?

Work offline. That's about it.

OneDrive can work offline if you set it to actually sync all of your files.

“offline” as in - on a computer that has no internet conmection whatsoever and syncing with floppy drives etc

Precisely. Also, no internal network. Employees shared data by passing floppies back and forth.

Briefcase also used shell extension madness, and allowed registration of merge handlers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/lwef/briefcas...

Never had a clue what that thing did.

As a kid, I used the briefcase as a normal folder (I think) just because the icon looked cooler.

Winpopup checking in

> And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.

Microsoft <3 Plan 9?

I believe it was "shell extensions". There's still a few of these lying around. You can even add your own ones: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/nse-imp...

It's not so easy to add to the filesystem, but you can make things show up in Explorer that you can click on.

Modern NTFS (Win2000 and later) has "reparse points", which are basically file entries with some metadata that triggers special handling. It's the mechanism used to implement soft links (that are handled transparently by the file system, as opposed with the shortcuts you use e.g. on the desktop), or to mount an NTFS volume as a directory inside another NTFS volume, or by OneDrive to download files on the fly when you open them, or to implement unix domain sockets. You can add your own, though it requires adding a filter-driver.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/repars...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_reparse_point

That is different level of abstraction and NTFS-only thing.

The mechanism mentioned in the article is Shell Namespace. Explorer.exe and friends do not operate on file system (ie. files and directories) but on tree of COM objects (called folders and items) that can represent pretty much anything, although usually represent file system directories and folders. The "Classes root" in "HKCR" means that this registry hive describes how names of these objects are transformed into the COM instances (either by directly naming the CLSID or by parametrizing the behavior of default class of filesystem objects). It works this way to this day. And for example the "Windows 10 God mode menu" is nothing else than exposing internal shell folder.

Well, Windows now uses a 9P server and client to mount WSL drives in Windows and viceversa, so maybe it's time for round two?

I think the WSL uses 9P.

One of the things that came from Microsoft Network that's still around is Expedia. Microsoft needed content to put on MSN and a few engineers got interested in the traveling business. Eventually the experiment turned into a website and then got spun off.

https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?t=1133

This video was linked in the article. What a trip down memory lane. This is the most 90's thing that ever existed.

Also, the explanation of what a "right click" is and how it is for "power users". Wow, how far we have come. (This is at 21:50 in the video).

Yep, now with touch screens it's even more hidden

Long pressing[0] is the touchscreen equivalent of a right click.

[0] Or, on very specific old iPhone models, force pressing

Can't say I've ever seen a non techy person do that

Did anyone learn the double-click on their own? Inscrutable gestures can exist on any pointing device.

I worked with a older guy, a tester who had retrained from some other industry. He was pretty good, very thorough - but I noticed he had a strange habit - he double clicked everything, even web links. I guess he was just told that was the way of computers!

I mean, macOS has pretty much ensured that their version of right clicking (cmd-click) is only used by power users.

Rich clients were all the rage back then: Apple eWorld, Compuserve, Pointcast etc.

And then everything swung to the web and then back to rich clients i.e. mobile apps.

It was called Project Blackbird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

"It was later revealed that Blackbird had severe performance problems because of an over-complex architecture which made excessive use of multi-threading. When prototypes of the Trident HTML layout engine were completed, and it was shown that the goals of complex layout in Blackbird could be achieved in HTML at better performance, it led to executives to rethink the project."

The dithering and fonts and the overall look of the MSN-inside Explorer really brings you back.

MSN was one of those things that you played around with because it came with MSN and you used the free trial (like you did for every ISP you could find back then). But I didn't know anyone who really used it past that.

There was a 'second' MSN, that was just a dial-up ISP. Very popular for including the $400 rebate when you bought a new computer at a retail store, you also got 2 years of a MSN dial-up contract to pay the $400 back.

MSN had an amazing Quake 2 and just general multiplayer games service for a while, I want to say it was called Games.com or something like that. The one day, poof it was gone.

zone.com? I would play Warcraft 2 multiplayer on there. Warcraft 2 had no natural Internet-based multiplayer, zone.com made it easy.

Zone was also where people played Heroes of Might & Magic III PvP, in early 00s, way before HoMM3 HD Lobby appeared.

I never used zone.com

But heat.net — anyone remember that one !!

War2 on heat.net

meimei ^_^ ekulfx anyone? :) hehe

Wasn’t Zone also used for Xwing vs Tie Fighter?

Fun times

I spent a lot of my youth playing Age of Empires 2 multiplayer on zone.com. It was great for its time.

thats the one!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Games

(also known as Zone.com - formerly known as The Village, Internet Gaming Zone, MSN Gaming Zone, and MSN Games by Zone.com)

CIX is still going in the UK. https://www.cix.uk/forums/accessing-forums

Just had a quick poke about and my last post was 22 year ago. Which was a bit of a gut-punch

Knoware (pun intended, probably), my first Internet provider, back in 1993, had a 9600 baud connection to the Internet, shared by all his customers. When I phoned the guy (late, as he worked at night and slept during the day) to get a login, his first question was: do you have a Mac? There was no TCP/IP stack for Windows back then (Trumpet Winsock only came out in 1994, and was not a Microsoft product). He had heard of linux, said that it probably would work, but I would be on my own.

Fast forward to 1995: Windows 95 still didn't have TCP/IP (that only came with service pack 1). MSN was clearly intended as a Windows Internet, to eclipse and make irrelevant the existing one, leaving Mac and linux outside in the cold.

Of course, the local pizza guy would have to pay to be on it. Win-win for Microsoft.

While Microsoft may well not have understood it (as a corporate entity, or indeed key decision makers at the firm) it was a done deal long before 1995.

I date it to late 1991/ early 1992 when JIPS stops being a pilot service.

Background, by 1990 there are two popular global networking technologies, the Internet Protocol suite of Unix adjacent technologies born in the US, and the X.25 suite of technologies popular in Europe and standardised by the ITU (ie mostly the world's phone companies). In the UK, naturally influenced by both as an English-speaking country right on the coast of Europe, in 1990 they have JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork, providing X.25 service to various universities across the country, much as the early Internet joins US universities.

In 1991 JANET announces JIPS, the JANET IP Service, as an experimental "pilot" project. Universities can choose to have this American protocol to try out as well as their existing X.25 service. JANET tries very hard to sell TCP/IP as merely an interesting experiment that you could use where X.25 doesn't have a good way to achieve something. Campuses rapidly ignore that, installing a Unix with a TCP/IP stack is something the enthusiastic Unix nerds in your Computer Science or Electronics departments will seize on, and despite an insistence that they should not use the Internet's email, because X.25 has email, too bad they're going to start doing SMTP. By the end of the year this "pilot" project is driving JANET adoption, it's no longer experimental, new "customers" see X.25 as an afterthought, their Unix nerds want IP and they want it ASAP -- JANET begins transitioning to just an IP network, the X.25 services will eventually be terminated.

That's game over, on a level playing field, X.25 v TCP/IP is a win for TCP/IP and the third Network will be the Internet. X.25 goes in the scrap pile with mechanical television and Boustrophedon. Things that might have taken over the world, and if they had we might think them normal - but in the end they did not.

I do remember this not-quite-internet at university in the 90s. Telnet was "spad" and FTP was "hhcp". If you wanted to connect to a real FTP server, you had to send hhcp requests to "ft-relay" and the FTP hostname was the first folder name under the root.

Coloured book protocols (X.25 based networking) existed at some UK universities as late as 1997, it was still possible to use this network when I was an undergraduate in 1995, but the service was no longer available by the time I graduated.

Here is a link to a site describing a system that you could use (probably considerably earlier than 1997) to access the Internet (in this case an FTP server) despite only yourself having X.25, via hhcp:

http://deslab.mit.edu/UNIXhelp/guestftp/index.html

Although it was not installed by default, the original release of Windows 95 did feature tcp/ip as an option that could be installed from the cd:

http://www.michusa.com/SupportFiles/win95ppp/win95.html

I started running a pre-release version in early 1995 and never had to install anything from the CD. Maybe it detected my off brand ne2000 network card and just installed it by default. Easy networking was my favorite part of windows 95 at the time.

MS was pushing information superhighway back then - a top down network done by big media players that was supposed to overcome Internet

It's getting there

"The raw, unfiltered mess of the Internet was quickly becoming the New Cool Thing, and no-one wanted to sign up for yet another Stupid Proprietary Thing"

Which is exactly what Microsoft is pushing today with their idiotic "Microsoft account," making it increasingly impossible to use Windows or their other products without signing on to this bullshit.

They clearly didn't learn the first time around. Nobody wants another goddamned account, Microsoft.

Playing devil's advocate here: For all practical purposes you need an account for macOS, iOS, and Android. What is so different with Windows?

Ignoring the mobile accounts, which are largely mandatory because of the App stores…

You need an account to login to a Mac, but it’s not an iCloud account. If you want to use iCloud, you can link your login account to it. But it is completely optional. I don’t understand at all why I needed to setup (and link) a Microsoft.com account to my personal computer.

The worst part is, I use multiple Microsoft online accounts. Which one should be associated with my computer login? My Xbox account? My work account? None of this makes sense to me.

It's our Personal Computer, not Microsoft's. But since discovering the peaceful i3WM on Debian the need to boot into the telemetry riddled spyware called Windows has been minimized. Need TPM? Use ProxMox and run Win11 without the 'required' hardware in an isolated network.

I always roll my eyes when people sneer at the "forced" hardware upgrade Windows 11 requires. Even when I patiently explain to them what it's for

The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?)

The only way to truly mitigate these issues (other than undoing 30 years of CPU advancement) was an entire top-to-bottom set of mitigations. From the silicon up through the operating system and even applications such as browsers

and I always roll my eyes when knowledgeable people pretend that Meltdown/Spectre/etc are a grave concern for consumer machines.

I roll my eyes even further back when knowledgeable people pretend to not understand that the endgame for TPM/Pluton/etc is DRM, censorship and privacy violations.

Do you know why people sneer at such forced hardware upgrades? Because, as others have pointed out, mitigating security vulnerabilities is seen as merely the narrative.

Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:

- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers

- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.

Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.

IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.

No it's not, no one not running a shared cloud service cares about such things.

Why doesn't Microsoft explain exactly why they require new CPUs, what in TPM 2.0 they're using that's not in 1.2, etc.

Except that most machines have arbitrary remote code execution via JavaScript in browser. I don't know how easily that can be exploited, but I wouldn't be surprised if ignoring the potential of this happening would bite us in the backside at some point.

If that was why, they should say that, they don't

Windows users have been conditioned into thinking it's acceptable to install invasive, malicious closed-source software. Hardware vulnerabilities are the least of their issues. The windows security model has been completely broken from the start.

There is nothing inherently „broken“ about the security design.

Do you even realise how diluted this sounds? I’m all for watching corporations closely, but the tale you’re telling is simply wrong, and I hope you know that, even if it sure is tempting that you might know better than the rest of the world…

Do you know better than Microsoft itself? Is it not true that Microsoft is tracking your movement across the OS? Is it not true that Microsoft tracks what apps you are running? Is it not true that Microsoft tracks every movement your MS account does? They admit they're doing it - what's your answer to that?

What you’re talking about isn’t the foundational security model of the operating system, but telemetry and tracking systems built into it.

I’m very much opposed to those too, but comparing them to the security model is apples vs. oranges. All I’ve seen so far, is that telemetry doesn’t open up any glaring holes in the security model of the operating system, but I’d be interested if you have any proof of that.

The telemetry is built right into the security model of the OS - thus the security model is broken. OS that betrays me by telling someone what I'm running is insecure.

I often look at these struggles with modern operating systems and think "BeOS wouldn't have done this". Then I laugh because in that world, BeOS would be where MacOS is now (quite literally certain on this), and would probably have resulted in the same product.

On macOS it asks you to set up once during the first startup, and then doesn’t nag you all the time if you don’t want to.

I set up Macs for people without an iCloud and it was not an issue - they didn’t miss it, aside from notes not syncing between devices and other features that need iCloud.

On Windows it will keep trying you to sign up all the time. I have just one machine with Windows, I don’t need an MS account, I don’t need their cloud features nor their store, and Windows keeps pushing me to set up one.

My Mac settings app has a permenent "1 notification" red dot, because I haven't logged my Apple ID in, and every so often (about once a month), a notification pops up to remind me to log my Apple ID in.

I'd love to learn how to get rid of those.

Ah, right, I forgot about these.

Question - is it because you didn’t add any apple ID, or that you added it but didn’t log in?

I remember MacOS prodding me the same way even with non-apple accounts when I added them but had expired passwords.

If it’s that then you can go to the „accounts” preference and remove all the accounts. Perhaps it will help.

> Playing devil's advocate here: For all practical purposes you need an account for macOS, iOS, and Android. What is so different with Windows?

Who says that your parent is not similarly opposed to these accounts?

Not really. I set all of my Macs up with a local administrator ID, and Apple does not make that a giant pain in the ass or underhandedly switch it to an online log-in during OS installation the way Microsoft does.

iOS is a bit more tied to an online account, but still not as offensive as Microsoft's execrable hounding and hobbling in Windows.

You definitely don't need an iCloud account to use Apple hardware.

Yet.

However you do have to deal with an unremovable red notification on your system preferences demanding you to sign in to use icloud.

I think you can't install anything on iOS without logging in, and the app store is the only way to get software (without rooting). I guess you could use the built in apps though, and the camera...

The iCloud service is separate from the App Store service, and you can be logged into one but not the other, however you log in to both using the same AppleID. You can actually be logged into iCloud using one AppleID and the App Store with a different one, at least a family member had their phone set up that way for a while, for reasons.

If you set up a Mac without an AppleID you'll constantly get nagged every time anything that requires it tries to do anything, which is frequently.

Like what?

Ah. Perhaps you had to migrate your Mojang account recently.

My daughter went through that yesterday. Stupid Microsoft continues to be stupid Microsoft.

I found it a bit jarring the way that the mass of regular BBSes go unmentioned in this piece. Fascinating though, I'm from the time (in the UK) and have no recollection of the Microsoft Network.

> they gave you a number like you were Patrick McGoohan. It'd be like 71477,134

So nice. I bloody wish we still had numeric IDs instead of email addresses and nicknames.

> At least now I can happily use fopen to read data from a website, right? And backup my email just by dragging folders from Gmail to a local disk. Right guys?

It would be nice to rsync to send/retrieve emails and manage my inbox. Maybe the original MSN concept needs to be revisited?

you mean like IMAP?

Yep, but it's another thing to install, and it's another thing to configure, right? If I had a json file that was my email configuration, and could use the `rsync` tool that comes with my *nix distribution, that would be a whole lot simpler.

I'm from the UK and in my forties, and I've never heard of 'Cix'. Just me?

I remember Cix, though I never had it. We had Demon giving me access to this incredible Internet thing, on the super fast 14.4kbps modem!

I was on Cix for several years. I can't remember what my username was. They had a really rather good mail and new client. A lot of the users were tech journalists and (oddly) airplane pilots. I originally connected using an acoustic coupler that ran at 9,600 baud.

I later migrated to Demon, which was originally formed by members of the Cix "tenner-a-month club" - a group that banded together to get real internet, instead of using Cix's curated internet gateways. Demon was a great ISP, until they were taken over by Scottish Power.

I'm an ex-demonite too. Had all the telehone numbers of the local pops (point of presence) in a file to copy to the moden after the ADT command. As the pops were heavily subscribed and would often just give engaged tones, I used to use the net at 6am. The phone rates were cheaper then too.

With email delivered to you via SMTP when you dialed up

I'm a bit older than you and it passed me by along with CompuServe and other BBSs. It was mentioned in magazines such as PC Pro but I didn't get a modem until Windows 95 came out. After a quick play with the Microsoft Network the web took over for me.

Back in the 90s every computer magazine columnist had a cix account at the end of their articles, certainly in Computer Shopper, PC Pro and PC Plus

It was... proprietary. The common "walled garden".

Everybody thought they could make a walled garden people would like better than the open internet. IBM had SNA, DEC had DECnet, Compuserve, WELL, ... None lamented.

There seems to be some nostalgia/lamentation of the glory days around WELL at least. It even technically still exists today.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

I've always been curious about what lies behind the WELL's paywall nowadays. I fear the answer is likely not much, but searching through their archives could be fascinating.

An associated question is, "why the hell would I want 12 months of msn with a new pc at Best Buy?!?", as I seem to remember most computers being bundled with walled garden isp deals in the late 90s.

I could never get my head around Briefcase, with floppies, ZIP drives, USB drives, FTP sites, .zip files through email.

And today I can't live without OneDrive. It's on all my computers, phones, tablets.

The writing here is great. Extra points for The Prisoner reference.

"They didn't even give you the decency of a username on CompuServe, they gave you a number like you were Patrick McGoohan"

My god, that code is horrid. I remember seeing code like that as a kid. Not being able to recognize any of the tokens was a huge turn-off for getting into Windows development.

Never had cable but I still figure MSNBC is part of this long-abandoned system and wonder why it's still on the air, some kind of zombie?

Yeah, it was the result of a deal intended to provide NBC content on MSN, giving it news and stuff. As MSN failed, its most successful content got turned into websites.

The MSNBC website back in the 90s was actually pretty great. It had a menu system that would update with live headlines. It was really impressive (to me, at least) back then.

I think MSNBC began as a joint effort between Microsoft and GE, but Microsoft sold its stake a long time ago at this point. It's bizarre that MSNBC has kept the name, but I guess it has branding value at this point.

No yt videos showing it off?

What I miss was comic chat.

Instead they had a VHS showing it off. https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?t=1133

it was dead long before people started doing that

there was a demo cd that had an offline example demo though (msn classic not 2.0)

What was dead ? Comic Chat still worked in xp last time I tried.

I remember using it on Windows 98 SE. It looked fun but it didn't take me a lot to figure out the thing was filled to the brim with crackers (it wasn't very secure) and creepy people posting weird custom cartoon porn. I've quickly noped the hell out of it.

I think that comes down to which IRC servers you were joining.

lights a candle for eWorld

Apple didn't own the eWorld infrastructure, and at the time they couldn't afford the bill they were getting from GE Information Systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld

In reading that Wikipedia article, I was reminded that another online service used by Apple morphed into AOL. I had an AppleLink dial up account as the tech support lead for all things Mac at work. It wasn't marketed as a consumer product.

Another native-like front end for dialup service at the time was "First Class", which could be self-hosted by any provider. The Berkeley Mac User Group BMUG had a great FirstClass BBS.

I remember rather liking FirstClass.

What was Mungo Park? Microsoft Sidewalk?

The article is unfair. "After all, these new directions brought the PC almost up to the same spec that other computers had been enjoying ten years ago." - this is simply not true. Apple, main competitor of PC's, still had years and years ahead to gain preemptive multitasking. Windows NT and even 95 were significantly ahead of competition.

The article refers to Amiga, which came out in 1985 with a multi tasking OS (Workbench). That was a popular computer, at least in Europe. It was not as popular as IBM PCs, but it did show that it was possible at a reasonable price.

Although the Amiga Workbench has pre-emptive multi-tasking it not only has but encourages use of a backdoor to switch off the pre-emption. As a result you don't gain as much as you might hope over systems with co-operative multi-tasking like Windows 3.x - Apps A, B and C may be getting along just fine, but if App D is selfish enough they're all screwed anyway. Together with lack of memory protection (for hardware cost reasons initially) this means Amigans don't end up making as much use of the multi tasking as you'd think - if I run A, B, C and D but then the system crashes, who do I blame?

That backdoor is still there and causing problems in 2022. You can buy a 64-bit multi-core "modern" Amiga but it is still running an OS with a stop-the-world backdoor to switch off pre-emption, and so it only ends up using a single core in 32-bit mode. Or you could put Linux on it.

It's not acceptable for 2022, it was bloody amazing in 1985. Obviously you pick the apps you run, so if you stuck to well behaving apps (and there were plenty) the multitasking was great. Crashes were a fact of life to be sure - one was wise to save often.

I didn't realize it was preemptive from the early ages.

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