Yesterday, we linked to a 1997 book about the Windows 95 file system, which is a great read. Don’t let the fun end there, though – the site hosting said book, Tenox.net by Antoni Sawicki, is a true treasure trove of in-depth books that while outdated today, are still amazingly detailed reads. I honestly have no idea which to pick to quote here as an example, so out of my own personal interest, I couldn’t really pass up “Configuring CDE: The Common Desktop Environment” by Charles Fernandez.
If you spend the major portion of your work day in front of a workstation chasing bits through the electronic networks of cyberspace, aka the information highway, so that your users can be more productive, this book is for you.
If you spend your days (or, thanks to some corporate edict, are about to spend your days) living in the Common Desktop Environment, so that your users can focus on their work and not the mechanics of getting to their work, this book shows you what you can do to make that environment their home.
There’s countless other great reads in the list, so peruse them and find your own favourites.
I had a decent collection of old computing books about programming languages, PC hardware, networking, windows APIs, etc. These were good reference books, but alas technology books become obsolete quickly. I didn’t want them to go in the trash, but since I couldn’t keep them any longer and I couldn’t even give them away, they went out for recycling.
Maybe these digitized books will have a better fate. Although it’s likely they’ll continue to decrease in utility, they do preserve the past. I’m trying to place myself in the shoes of someone a few centuries from now, assuming there’s no world war that would come through and take everything down. Would they have any interest in our technical books? If nothing else, they could make for interesting museum exhibits along-side our PCs behind “do not touch” signs.
In the future there will be a panel of expert historians who will study our technology, much like we study the romans and egyptians. I wonder how our epoch will compare to others? Do we stand out or will we fade into oblivion? How much of us will actually get preserved in the long run?
archive.org also has an impressive collection: https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy_computer .
Better known as Windows 1.0, surely the file system was basic FAT back then. Did it even support subfolders back then?
Well, I must say I never knew that there was a Xenix implementation for the Lisa.
That’s truly new to me.
I’m disappointed there was nothing on Windows 1.
I’ve yet to find legacy documentation on developing under Windows 1. Keep trying to find a old MS manual or some other book, but so far to no avail.
Windows 1, and part of Windows 2 were both pre-386, and even pre-286, so I’m keen on how they managed multiple processes and share resources.
Whartung,
Scans of most of the binders are available at http://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-history/windows-library/ and you can get the SDK header files and whatnot from any number of websites, such as this one: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?31566-My-Collection-of-Ol…
Hope this helps!