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Slavish Compatibility

  • Artigo

It's no secret the levels of effort that Microsoft goes through to maintain software compatibility.

However, it's not as well known that Microsoft's hardware division has a similar passion for compatibility

Back in the early 1990s, Valorie worked on printer drivers for Windows 3.1. Her division was led by Steve Shaiman (another person in the division was a program manager named Gabe Newell)

When Steve was cleaning out his office one day, he found a box in his office, and he checked what was inside it.

It was the very first shipment of Microsoft Mice, newly arrived from the factory in Microsoft Taiwan.

He kept one for himself, gave one to Valorie, and sent the rest to the Microsoft archives. Valorie, in turn gave the mouse to me, since she knew I had a collection of Microsoft mice hung up on my office walls.

Fast forward ten years, it's now 2001. I'm working in the Connected Home Business Unit, which was (at the time) located in the same office area as the Microsoft hardware group.

Just for grins, I showed the device compatibility tester for the hardware division (the entire wall of his office was covered in mice).

So what's the first words out of this guys mouth?

"Hmm.  I wonder if this thing works with our current drivers?  No reason it shouldn't.."

He removes the mouse from the packaging, plugs it into the serial port of his Windows 2000 machine, and the mouse driver on the machine detected the mouse, and started using it.

So the current Microsoft mouse driver even supports the very first Microsoft mouse ever delivered.

 

Now THAT'S compatibility.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    My family had one of the second generation (The generation preceding the dove bar, IIRC.)Microsoft bus mice on an old Compaq Portable. Later on, we upgraded to an ALR 386sx with an ATI VGA Wonder Plus. One of the things ATI did with its video cards those days was bundle a generic bus mouse and incorporate a bus mouse interface on the video board.

    I remember pretty clearly that it was possible to use the ATI bus mouse interface with a Microsoft mouse and the Microsoft driver. That may have been more due to ATI's reverse engineering than anything else, but I remember being impressed by the compatability at the time.

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    It is times like this when I wish I had that emoticon that simply reads 'This thread is useless without pictures' or something.. :)

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    Isn't it true, though, that the hardware protocol for serial mice hasn't changed in all that time, and thus it's not really support for the first mouse, but every really old mouse?'

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    I'm living in Germany and today is a sad day for compatibility.
    They basically broke something that is as old as black/white-TV: They switched of terrestical television and now use the UKW-frequencies for digital MPEG2-TV. They today pulled the plug in Hessen (part of Germany).

    Kind of sad: The very first TV-sets that were only b/w should have been working until yesterday.

    Now everybody needs set-top-boxes!

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    Wow, they broke b&w tv? Major bummer that.

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    Chris,

    >> It's fascinating to me, how our colour TV standard (NTSC) was designed to work on existing black & white TV's and did not use any more bandwidth.

    Wow, an advantage of NTSC. Didn't know there were any. ;-)

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2004
    So? The same is true of Solaris.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2004
    Mr Blobby - binaries compiled for the first release of Solaris still run? That's darned cool.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2004
    > there's no reason why the "free to air" boxes shouldn't do this

    There's a perfectly good technical reason: to decode two channels at once you need twice as much electronics. There are digital receivers that can emit multi channel signal (they are called tranceivers), but they are awfully expensive.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2004
    Because I live in a old house converted to flats, Murdoch and co won't sell Pay TV to individuals. So the whole house has to buy one subscription and share. While I don't subscribe (I fear spending my life watch Asian Financial News - it is addictive) my neighbours pay 1/11th of a normal subscription (and Foxtel supplies 11 TV guides etc).

    Win ME/98 was supplied with a CDRom driver written by Oak, it was version 91. 4x (or maybe 2x) Creative CDRom come with Oak ver 4. Ver 91 does not work with the early creative CDs. I always found this wierd.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2004
    Solaris actually GUARANTEES binary compatibility, whether it be for Sun's own applications or those from third parties. They even boast about it in their Solaris 10 promotional video, see http://webcast-east.sun.com/ramgen/archives/GSN-1865/GSN-1865_01_056.rm

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