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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

It was later revealed exactly what the purpose was, when internal mail discussions came out in court.

"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is dr-dos and then go out to buy ms-dos. or decide to not take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."

-- Brad Silverberg, Microsoft, 1991, as quoted at https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_inc... and in many other reports of the court case that one can still find.

That was the purpose.

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Would it be legal to create similar incompatibilities if there is both a legal business justification (that particular solution can be implemented in X developer time and would cost us Y money which wins against a proper implementation) and an engineering justification (that particular solution would use X less bytes of disk/RAM and would run better on Y% of our customer's machines) for an implementation which heavily depends on undocumented internals of another product?

Or "Gaslighting" in modern idiom.

No, "gaslighting" is a term for specifically making somebody doubt their own sanity by sabotaging their perception of their own actions.

It's not simply lying or creating fear, it's something a lot more insidious, and I don't think it can be really done on a non-specific target.

Eg, an example would be intentionally hiding somebody's keys to convince them they can't keep track of anything, or scheduling an appointment the person is supposed to go to, never telling them about it, then arguing they were told several times, they're just dumb and forgot.

> sanity by sabotaging their perception of their own actions.

I don't think "of their own actions" belongs in the definition. Perception of others actions, as well as basic facts, can be under attack as well.

The classic term is "FUD" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt#M...

Interesting! I stand corrected, though I think the MS explanation does sound plausible for the times.

Can this "Windows poked around in the guts of DOS" and "DOS 4.0 patched Windows" sort of mechanic be verified elsewhere?

Sorry, you bought Microsoft lies hook, line, and sinker. No shame! Everybody did. That's why DR-Dos isn't with us any more.

What they said it's entirely plausible is the problem, and that's why people bought it. Even if it was true, it's on Microsoft for doing that, not DR-Dos for being incompatible. It's like how you needed to be using IE6 to browse the web, or using Microsoft Word from Microsoft Office to edit your documents.

What's really sad is how much things have shifted against Microsoft. Now it's Apple's turn on top, and people are buying that same line just as naively. iMessage this and iCloud that.

I didn't originally, I used MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS and even I think PTS-DOS at some point. I liked trying weird stuff.

This is well past the point where any of this actually mattered. It's just plausible to me that there was more than one reason for it. Eg, that Windows poked in DOS brains and did weird stuff is a very convenient thing to the higher ups who wanted an excuse to have less competition, so both things can be true at the same time -- that Microsoft was unethical, but there was a technical reason as well.

Arguably of course all of that should have been documented and have a proper API for it

> It's just plausible to me that there was more than one reason for it.

The code that put up the fake error messages (in the Windows beta versions) when running drdos was xor encrypted in an apparent effort to obfuscate / hide the code. What possible reason would there be for MS to try to escape detection if there was any legitimate reason for the error messages?

These BS error messages have a more modern equivalent by MS-- MS added open document support to MS office natively, having already supported odt with a plugin in their earlier version in order to do business in places that mandated open data formats. The native odt support would convert all formulas in a spreadsheet to the static values they calculated to the first time the spreadsheet was opened by MS Office. Destroying people's work to annoy them to using their proprietary formats. The old plugin did not have this issue (so MS did know how to implement proper support, and had to expend effort re-writing existing code in order to get the 'destroy document' feature to work).

Not connected to the AARD code, but the abominations that MS did to boot floppies in Win9x with volume tracker (or IHC code) is worth a mention:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-ihc-damage/

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/148/Q148637/

jdebp touches the matter on the page on (previous) messing up with bootsectors by MS-DOS:

http://jdebp.info/FGA/volume-boot-block-oem-name-field.html

(but those DOS ones were only about not trusting the BPB fields, not about corrupting the OEM field)

> Even if it was true, it's on Microsoft for doing that, not DR-Dos for being incompatible.

Why should Microsoft have gone out of their way to make windows compatible with some operating system it was never designed to run on?

I think the implication is that MS went out of its way to make windows not compatible with others (or just appear to be by throwing bogus messages from xor encrypted obfuscated code).

E.g., MS windows 3.1 running in a window under Desqview ran faster than Windows 3.1 running natively. This was presumably embarrassing for Microsoft. Microsoft removed the operating mode that windows ran in that was supported by Desqview in Windows 3.11. Perhaps there were legitimate reasons for this feature removal, but breaking compatibility with a competitor's product would only be seen as a benefit by MS management, and is plausibly the exclusive reason for removing the feature.

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