The Corvette that Windows zip folders bought
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https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
So, the original mistake was offering people to open downloads without saving them first. I'm pretty sure they removed that later, around the time "mark of the web" was added (a metadata on downloaded files that triggered extra/different confirmation dialogs on opening the file).
Corvette lt1 is $70k which was $40k in 1993.
It would be $780k today if invested in S&P 500. A nice retirement safety net.
It would be $6 million today if invested in Microsoft stock. That's fuck you money.
So kids, if you're young and have unexpected windfall, invest it at least in S&P 500 index.
But I'm not surprised most people don't do that. I didn't at that age.
The position of the US is largely due to its ability to print money in the modern era and that era is ending. When company performance is largely determined by central bank interest rates you don't have a real economy.
Of course, this is the internet and rational people don’t talk like this.
Try mouthing off to a city inspector or a customs cop because you have $6M. They’ll fuck you right back like any other five or six figure pleb. Fuck you money starts somewhere in the hundreds of millions or perhaps low single digit billions.
I think it's fair to settle for 99.99% "fuck you".
I don't think another $6 million would mean much to him
Not quite as impressive as this $6M Corvette, but still a fun story.
But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.
and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser
mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...
Added to my local Windows 95 software archive: http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/pier-10se/047/VZIP150/in...
https://web.archive.org/web/19961228084852/http://visualzip.... seems to have been archived after the software was already sold to MS.
Its old TUCOWS download page suggests "Formerly ZIPExplorer" and it seems like that was in conflict with this ZipExplorer: https://web.archive.org/web/19980207094220/http://creative.n...
I'll probably never use it over WinZip 6.2 or whatever but that's a nice story and it will be cool to see how it compares to the version that eventually shipped with the 98 Plus! pack.
> be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature
It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.
If I had to bet, I'd say it's deliberate. It's Windows code, it works, and it still works. God knows what will break if you change that hallowed code.
Of course it's a guessing game to try to put any numbers (amount or $ values) to any of that.
How are the tarballs you get out of it invalid? Do you have a sample file I could take a look at?
FWIW, since it is bsdtar it supports a few additional options[1] to control the format. You can pass --format=gnutar, --format=zip, --format=ustar, --format=7zip, ... for a bit more flexibility and to create archives in other formats.
[1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bsdtar&sektion=1&f...
I'll see if my old devops code history can produce a bad-state tarball and get back to you.
[1]: https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/disk-compression-stacker-double...
When I've sold something - am I expected to continue to maintain it out of the goodness of my own heart? It's not owned by me anymore. If the purchaser wants to maintain it and/or pay me to then that's up to them. It's Microsoft which abandoned it, not the individual.
Probably I can't even create a more-optimal product. Any contract worth the paper it is written on would have a clause which says 'you can't go out and recreate an identical product immediately'.
And yes, it's a luxury purchase, but it was an unexpected windfall. They had a job with Microsoft so were presumably making a decent wage that covered their regular expenses already. Why not buy something to make you happy?
The fundamental point of capitalism is that you work, get paid, and then can spend your money on whatever you want even if its silly. If the author likes cars, so be it.
Microsoft could have put 3 of their programmers to work on this for one month. But it's probably faster and more convenient to just buy it out.
Was this not the case at Microsoft in the 90s?
Just because something is in the contract doesn't mean it gets enforced to the letter if neither side wants it to be.
I had colleagues would worked on a project in their space time, their price was reasonable wanting only compensation for the hours spend working on. The company didn't want it, but they also could not sell it, because if was so heavily tied into our systems and work flows that they couldn't reasonably sell it anywhere else.
One of those developers then started working on another project, one that was so fare away from what we did that there was no way the company would want it and turned that project into a very successful business.
In reality what happens is that people will work on something, quit, and the spend a few months on polishing and then release their project or sell it. Very few companies will want to spend time going after a former employee building some side business far removed from their core business.
There are any amount of large companies where being employed by multiple entities is either frowned upon to expressly verboten. Of course, there are also any number of companies that do no care as long as you deliver, and many that actively encourage / expect nerds to nerd out in our spare time :)
It boils down to, employee transfers IP to their consulting firm, and the firm agrees to transfer ownership of the IP for which hours were billed to produce.
IME, the firm I worked for would not bill clients for work done to our shared libraries. I'd record those hours to the firm itself, but I would still get paid the same.
And yes, I've tried to push back on those, and so far no employer has been willing to negotiate.
Many people don't know it's there, for various reasons. But it typically is - after all, that's just corporations learning from history.
And hey it worked out great for Microsoft— they got the software they wanted at a great price (1x used corvette * ~1.8 for taxes) with no negotiation, and they already employ the guy who wrote it so I imagine integrating it was even easier than they expected.
The trick is to never do any side gigs that are directly related to the main activities at work.
Ah, yes, the reverse of the "Javascript changes too quickly and has too many libraries" problem; companies refusing to rewrite old code because "it still works".
I feel like we should all be striving for the perfectly balanced as all things should be moments in development, code should never be left to languish for years without updates, but nor should it be updated when the wind changes.
According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98... "Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking."
Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft.
Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!"
It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there.
According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own:
History: Sep-26-96 Davepl Created (from old VZip code)
Also there was that one time last fall where they gave a meme website a discount code that brought the price down to €9.99 and sold 5000 licenses in a day.
Of course, if you did that today Microsoft would probably sue you for competing with them.
> Keep in mind I'd asked for permission and got it in writing BEFORE I started. But yes, it was generous of MSFT to allow me that flexibility right from the first date of hire...
source: https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1764646948769079705
On the contrary, power users like me use 7zip because built-in ZIP support is so slow. And the vast majority of regular users - they just silently suffer and use the slow-built in.
(And I use 7zip because it's the least bullshit compressor/extractor I know - works perfectly fine through context menus, without having to ever look at the main UI. But you know what would be even less bullshit? The compress/extract functionality in explorer.exe! If only it wasn't dog slow...)
Edit: he also tells that he gets this question often.
It was slow. Unzipping archived source with thousands of files could take an hour or more... or 15 seconds via pkunzip.
It didn't warn of corruption. Windows-unzip a corrupted file, and it will just stop at the point of corruption with no feedback, as though complete. Using pkunzip you'd get a warning about a corrupted file.
Being that slow, and not reporting errors are two things that really aren't acceptable. I have no idea if it's improved since then.