Here’s one I remember from the early 90s. There was a company that was going to produce a 100x (or something like that) CD-ROM drive. It was a combination CD-ROM drive and hard drive cache. It would start reading the CD as soon as it was inserted, and then would handle requests by transferring both to the hard drive and the system.

This could have been useful even as drives got faster, but I don’t think it ever came out. If it did, it was a total flop.

How about the yearly announcements of "this is the year of linux on the desktop!"

2002

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878206,00.html

2003

http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-05/linuxdesktop_01.html

2004

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=568003838&fp=16&fpid=0

2006

http://www.nuxified.org/how_microsoft_is_loosing_to_gnu_linux

2008

http://groupehudson.com/postnuke/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=111

James

Beaten to the WinFS punch. Raymond’s asking for trouble with this topic. A couple of Microsoft mentions in this article on<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware">vapourware</a&gt;. Project Cairo, Longhorn and that reliable stick WinFS…

Addmitedly it’s not just MS. Apple’s long search for a replacement OS provides another rich seam of vapour until they bought NeXT. I guess the difference with MS and Apple is that both of them have produced some worthwhile stuff in their time. Raymond’s examples are purest marketing tosh.

Check out Atomchip: http://atomchip.com/

I’m sorry, but I still miss Cairo. (And WorkplaceOS, and PinkOS, and Taligent…)

http://www.byte.com/art/9511/sec6/art14.htm

‘[…]in 1992, Bill Gates announced that Cairo would arrive in three years and would incorporate object-oriented technologies, especially an object file system. […] It seems that Cairo is Microsoft’s sly way of promising the world. "Will we see Plug and Play in NT?" "Oh yes, of course, in Cairo." "Will NT ever produce world peace and cheap antigravity?" "You bet — in Cairo." ‘

http://www.byte.com/art/9611/sec10/art5.htm

15 years later, I think that NT 7.0 will have all Cairo features. 8-))

As I’m sure we all know, Vista was originally supposed to ship 2002.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/ballmer_vista_delay/

Just because it eventually ships doesn’t make it not vaporware.

If ZeoSync had really, as they claimed, found a way to break the pigeonhole principle I would be more than happy with 100:99 lossless compression, as it would be possible to repeat the process infinitely.

In real life avoiding the pigeonhole principle is, of course, not possible.

Oh, the phantom did exist – I interviewed at Infinium in Seattle in December 2004. (A friend of mine from Sierra worked there now, and I didn’t fancy moving to Alabama with the rest of the start-up I was working at).

They had some solid tech*, some solid hardware (mainly the keyboard & mouse stuff), but ultimately, as far as I could see, no market. Their hardware would always be out of date, and especially with the 360 being what it is today (and the Live Marketplace stuff), they would have been crippled pretty much out of the door.

* Can’t talk about the tech. NDA. Sorry. But let me just say that it was a very innovative streaming solution for downloadable content.

DavidE, my now-wife bought one of those CD-ROM drives, probably near the end of the life cycle.

At the time we bought it, it was a perfectly-servicable 20x drive that came with a driver that did the caching, no extra hardware required. Presumably, the driver would have basically worked with any CD drive, although it may have been locked by programming fiat.

The extra caching was basically useless. Dedicating a full ~700MB of hard drive to the cache was difficult, dedicating much less made the cache noticably less useful. Programs running off of CD were aleady optimized for that use case anyhow, so the gain was often minimal. And I can’t tell for certain, but I’d swear sometimes the cache was fragmented on the drive such that it would actually come off the CD <i>faster</i> than off the hard drive.

Last, but not least, it tried to cache the data as soon as you stuck the CD in the drive. Unfortunately, when you stick the CD in the drive also happens to be when you want to use the program, but the caching process wanted exclusive access (by which I mean it was trying to read the drive as quickly as possible, not necessarily a hardware lock). I don’t recall if you had to kill it to access the drive at all, or if it merely contended for the drive, but I do remember that until the caching was complete, the drive was effectively useless.

Also, while caching, it ate up a lot of hard drive bandwidth and time saving, of course.

A more transparent implementation might have worked. If it dectected that you were accessing the drive and took the opportunity to grab those blocks (as near as I could tell it could only cache what it read directly, it couldn’t take advantage of incidental reads), and if it stopped the caching process until the drive was idle for some time (and ideally, both the CD and the hard drive), it might have been a lot cooler. As it was, the only use case it helped was "I insert a CD with the intention of using it in about half an hour". This is not a use case that needs a lot of speeding up.

The good thing is, it was a 20x drive in a time of 52x drives, and I hate the higher speed drives that sound like they’re going to shake themselves apart; give me a slightly slower drive that doesn’t vibrate when the CD is the tiniest bit unbalanced any day.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operation system, and possible program, of all time.

   — Bill Gates

People did get hold of copies of CherryOS, it’s how they confirmed it was basically a rip-off of PearPC.  CherryOS was then retired when everyone and their dog started screaming "fraud" at them.

Actually, its rather easy to cache several CDs.

1. ‘backup’ your cd in the form of an ISO image.

2. use one of several tools (winiso, winrar, poweriso) to mount the iso image as a drive letter (or just as a file)

Not <a href=”here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

• A "redesign" after 2019 erased thousands of user's comments from previous years. As many have stated, the comments are nearly as important as the postings themselves. The archived copies of the postings contained here retain the original comments.
• The blog has changed domains many times and the urls have otherwise been under constant change since 2003. Even when proper redirection has been set up for those links, redirection only works for a limited period of time. For example, all of the internal blog links that were valid in early 2019, were broken by 2020 without proper redirection.
• The blog has been under constant re-design and re-theming since its inception. It is downright irritating to deal with a bogged-down site experience as the result of the latest visual themes designed for cell-phone browsers. As of this writing, it is cumbersome to navigate titles with only 10 entries per page. While it is nice that the official site has a search feature, searching using this index (with all titles on a single page) is much quicker (CTRL-F in most browsers).