So.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS?
If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.
So.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS?
If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.
This mostly describes stuff to do with the [Windows] NT [OS][/2] (delete as appropriate) kernel layer, which normal mere mortals aren't supposed to interact with. You're supposed to use stuff like the Win32 KERNEL32.DLL not the more direct DLL, NTDLL.DLL (a DLL). Of course, true hackers scorn such abstractions.
I think Windows and DOS do have good documents. I actually think they had way better ones than Linux at the time. But I could be wrong.
For reference:
https://jacobfilipp.com/msj-index/
And also MSDN.
Windows programming guides provided by Microsoft were simply amazing for the time; the documentation available was excellent.
Part of the reason they did so well, companies could easily implement software using the new APIs.
Of course, they also had secret and undocumented APIs that people found and wanted to use ...
Was MSDN always free? I remember their access prices for the services in the late 90s and early 00s were eyewatering.
Microsoft's eye wasn't on open sourcing their OS and describing the deep internals. They still don't want you to develop against the NT API, even though developers certainly do (and Microsoft makes compatibility shims for applications which do, when required).
I have a hot take. manpages are really bad for noob examples, or if you actually want to learn how to use something. They are great references if you already know 95% of the tool, but for the most common use cases, they completely lack any sort of examples.
In this sense, LLMs (as much as I am sceptical about them) are much more useful.
Yeah I agree, TBF I rarely found man-pages to be useful to me, while so far LLM is pretty good at bash scripting, at least at the level that I need. But of course still wants to learn this stuffs in depth.