How Things Like This Happen

The author of the X-file suite explains what led to breaking the 15KB barrier.

Get It Try It

I guess it all started with that call from Mark Ward. But actually it started a lot earlier. I was at IBM for a week and the delegates were great. I told them I had a Win2K beta with me and they wanted to see it. We set it up on a 64MB box from Big Blue.

As this machine was not needed by the class, we left Win2K on there a couple of days so anyone could toy around with it. When I returned to it I noticed Winfile was screwing up.

I'd installed my own configuration on the box without thinking about it. Part of my configuration was the Winfile executable image. It was only several weeks later that I realized that my Winfile was not preempting the one in system32; there was no Winfile in system32 at all. Winfile was gone.

It was patently clear to me that Redmond was trying to discourage the 'old' way of looking at file systems. We who grew up on MVS and UNIX knew about file system hierarchy but didn't necessarily appreciate this namespace business. Already when running the 'premium' release of '95' you could tell something was wrong. The multimedia was great, watching Paul Simon's new wife sing along with Barry White was cool, but the system chugged and chugged, a lot of steam and very little oomph.

Winfile sold me on Windows. I'd seen and run Windows from the beginning and found nothing impressive about it. But Winfile was an app you couldn't live without. I found myself booting into Windows just to get a good overview of my file system, then exiting again. After a while it seemed such a bother so I decided to stick it out.

All told it took about a year and a half, and I know the project is not completed either. Perhaps five years from now I will be in a position to forget the code.

It's been a nightmare. I have been very rusty as a programmer, teaching too much you might say, and I did not relish doing this at all. Yet I knew I had to. As Roger Moore's 007 once said, 'There is no alternative.'

So many people have taken to the XPT, amazed at its 'industrial strength' and compactness. Of course we are very proud. But this is something else. It is certainly the greatest event in our short three year history online.

I hope this enhances everyone's experience.

Rick