Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!a.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Microsoft cuts corners, actuall Message-ID: <76000278@p.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: 19 Aug 88 14:59:00 GMT References: <6766@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> Lines: 18 Nf-ID: #R:umn-cs.cs.umn.edu:6766:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76000278:000:925 Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies Aug 19 09:59:00 1988 I heard that Microsoft had a "pseudo language" interpreter they used to write their software (e.g. Excel). This was something like a pascal P-code interpreter. The interpreter supposedly saved a lot of memory (hence MS-Word runs in 220K). But to do this, they had to use the upper bits of each 32-bit pointer for extra data. This is fine on an MS-DOS machine, which is physically incapable of accessing more than 1Mb of memory, but kills you on a macintosh. So the Excel problem wasn't actually sloppiness -- Microsoft was trying to write innovative software that used very little memory, and got bit by 1 Mb+ machines. Wasn't Excel released for 128K machines? Then the software DID last for 2 generations of hardware..... pretty good... Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois 1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801 ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies