Raymond Chen’s blog posts are one of the best things coming out of Microsoft.

As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.

Personally, I prefer cool blog posts over "add another Copilot button that does nothing to something that did not require it anyway" or "paper over a perfectly fine API with a newer version that has 60% of the functionality and 120% of the bugs" (which is what Microsoft engineering mostly seems to boil down to these days), but you be you...

The Old New Thing is very much engineering. Any contemporary engineers who don't think they have anything to learn from the experience of the past as recounted in the blog are doomed to repeat the same missteps.

And much as one would hope that Raymond Chen's blogging is holding up any important Microsoft initiatives, I very much doubt that it's much of a distraction for a megacorporation.

Turbo Pascal and other Borland products used to use keys based on WordStar. These days JOE (Joe's Own Editor) still uses a similar keyset.

WordStar was basically all we needed, and it still is.

Imagine if you had something that small and powerful today.