Comment by aaronbrethorst
2 days ago
Is that what inspired the "Exchange: The Most Feared and Loathed Team in Microsoft" license plate frames? I'm probably getting a bit of the wording wrong. It's been nearly 20 years since I saw one.
2 days ago
Is that what inspired the "Exchange: The Most Feared and Loathed Team in Microsoft" license plate frames? I'm probably getting a bit of the wording wrong. It's been nearly 20 years since I saw one.
Probably. A lot of people really loved MSMAIL; not so much Exchange.
I have more long, boring stories about projects there, but that’s for another day
And sometimes they loved MSMAIL for the weirdest reasons...
MSMAIL was designed for Win3.x. Apps didn't have multiple threads. The MSMAIL client app that everyone used would create the email to be sent and store the email file on the system.
An invisible app, the Mail Pump, would check for email to be sent and received during idle time (N.B. Other apps could create/send emails via APIs, so you couldn't have the email processing logic in only the MSMAIL client app).
So the user could hit the Send button and the email would be moved to the Outbox to be sent. The mail pump wouldn't get a chance to process the outgoing email for a few seconds, so during that small window, if the user decided that they had been too quick to reply, they could retract that outgoing email. Career-limited move averted.
Exchange used a client-server architecture for email. Email client would save the email in the outbox and the server would notice the email almost instantly and send it on its way before the user blinked in most cases.
A few users complained that Exchange, in essence, was too fast. They couldn't retract a misguided email reply, even if they had reflexes as quick as the Flash.
I re-wrote MSPAGER for Exchange. Hoo boy what a hack that was! A VB3 app running as a service, essentially. I don't know if you remember romeo and juliet; those were PCs pulled from pc-recycle by a co-worker to serve install images.
2 replies →
> A few users complained that Exchange, in essence, was too fast.
That is something that's actually pretty common and called "benevolent deception" - it has been discussed on HN some years past, too [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16289380
1 reply →
Ha, maybe my old memory is rusty, but I feel like I recognize this name and you had an old blog with some quotable Raymond Chen -- one bit I remember was something like
"How do you write code so that it compiles differently from the IDE vs the command line?" to which the answer was "If you do this your colleagues will burn you in effigy when they try to debug against the local build and it works fine"
Yup, that’s me.