A former Microsoft engineer has waxed lyrical about how he and a colleague made a sporting bet over how far a new build of Windows would get before cr

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

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2024-03-29 13:30:07

A former Microsoft engineer has waxed lyrical about how he and a colleague made a sporting bet over how far a new build of Windows would get before crashing.

Clue? Further than you might think. Plummer, the programmer that worked on MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows NT, yesterday explained how a dollar bill came to be affixed to a Redmond noticeboard.

It was 1994, and Microsoft was hard at work porting the Windows 95 interface to Windows NT for what would eventually become NT 4. Some – this hack included – might regard peak NT as Windows NT 3.51, replete with the Program Manager shell, but the Start Menu needed to be included and so the porting had to be done.

It was all a bit of a daunting task, starting with getting the Windows 95 user interface compiling for Windows NT, before tackling anything else.

"That meant adapting every system call that differs between 95 and NT, handling cases that just won't work on NT," said Plummer.