Hacker News Reader

Comment by macjohnmcc | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago when I worked at Microsoft I asked for the source code to Solitaire. A few days later I received a stack of CD-ROMs with the entire source code of Windows NT (4.0 maybe).

View on HN

And what of the source code to Solitaire!?

Cool memory, thanks for sharing.

Can't wait until cozy bear leaks that :D

Make that winning animation use the GPU!

NT 4 code was already leaked almost full back in 2004. You can still find it with relative ease if you know where to look, or search for certain keywords in the code.

Man I'm old, but give me NT 4 with modern technology support, modern drivers and GPU driven and I would move in a heartbeat.

What do you miss the most? The UI? Speed?

Yes! UI was amazing and obviously you can’t beat the speed it would run at on modern hardware

UI shouldn't be too hard (https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/8628/). I am not so sure about the speed if you'll use modern drivers.

Honestly I think Xfce is about the same. And probably more stable, though obviously it's hard to do a direct comparison.

The window chrome is fine but the settings are a bit of a mess in my opinion.

Depending on the "Distro" and compile options/build flags/included libraries MATE is as fast and light, since at least 6 years, actually. I think the first distribution which showed that to a general audience was LMDE a.k.a. Linux Mint - Debian Edition.

UX, speed, simplicity, lightness. Applications ran without talking to the internet, asking if it's ok to run it, telling me it's probably unsafe to run it, telling me I need to update for security reason, telling me I should play candy crush, letting me search my files without adding recommended noise somewhat supposed to be relevant to what I did 3 days ago. I could go on. I just want to stare at a blue flat colour knowing tomorrow it will be just the same. /s

Yeah I remember when there weren't dozens of services running in the background just for basic OS functionality.

It took ages to figure out where the code even was in the many files and folders. The directory structure did not make it obvious.

I just thought of something. At the time blank CD-R's were about $15 each and the fastest burners at the time were 2x burners. I'm sorry I wasted so much of time the person who burned these and the cost of the media!

That was before Source Depot, I presume.

They were using SLM (Slime) but I did not have access to the server since I was on a different project (Microsoft Systems Management Server).

> a stack of CD-ROMs with the entire source code of Windows NT

That's a lot of code. Scary.

>That's a lot of code.

It's estimated to be around 40 million lines of code

And it was not compressed it was just a bunch of files and folders. My guess is it was around 15 CD-ROMs

40 million lines of 80 characters would fit in 5 CDs. With a more reasonable average length, it'd fit comfortably in 3.

And 40 million lines for an OS is a crazy amount of code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com