Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:21:06 JST feld
   This man's brain is stuck in 2000s Windows-world.
   
   Microsoft made Excel for PPC Macs since the late 90s.
   
   There were even versions of *WINDOWS* that ran on PPC, Alpha, and MIPS (Microsoft Office 4.2 / Windows NT) CPUs and yes, Excel was on there too.
   
   Excel was never limited to x86 CPUs.
   • Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:29:49 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld there was no builds of office for nonx86 windows afaik, just a prerelease build for alpha that was a legal obligation for them to make
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:29:49 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     You're saying this press release from 1994 was as far as it got?
     
     https://web.archive.org/web/20121022143002/http://www.thefreelibrary.com/MICROSOFT+ANNOUNCES+WORD+6.0+AND+MICROSOFT+EXCEL+5.0+FOR+WINDOWS+NT...-a015839910
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:31:23 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     The versions are available for download here:
     
     https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/5x
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:36:03 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld only seems to be alpha the only platform they i thought they did a build for but i didn't realize it got to release
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:36:03 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     Here's an Alpha version of BackOffice Small Business Server
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:38:55 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     @feld ms was legally required to support alpha for a while because of a lawsuit related to stealing windows nt code or something like that
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:38:55 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     Yeah I remember some legal mumbo jumbo was involved
     
     Surprisingly hard to find photos of these
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:40:29 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld i worked at a place with both an sgi nt box and an alpha nt box, i don't know who 3was buying this exotic stuff becasuse nobody needed it
     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: (tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:41:11 JST Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:

     in reply to
     @feld I'm glad we've moved on from that world.
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:44:10 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld thanks for the cd key sucker
     lainy likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:44:44 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld anyway Your original point is valid, there was a non x86 office released, you were right and i was wrong
     
     although i still believe no non x86 non alpha platforms made it
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:44:44 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon
     > you were right and i was wrong
     
     :cawg: :cawg: :cawg: :cawg: :cawg: :cawg: :cawg:
     
     MY POWER GROWS BY THE DAY
     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:57:52 JST feld

     in reply to

     • \\
     • Sexy Moon
     • Casually running on stock!
     that's a lot more recent though
   • Embed this notice
     Casually running on stock! (skoll3@nixnet.social)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:57:53 JST Casually running on stock!

     in reply to

     • \\
     • Sexy Moon
     @Moon @feld @slash there is also MS office for ARM on Windows RT and Windows Phone
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:57:54 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to

     • \\
     @slash @feld sorry for being unclear, meant non x86 WINDOWS office
   • Embed this notice
     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:57:55 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @feld i think so yeah, if there's retail copies of non x86 office, i want the fucking box to put on a shelf
   • Embed this notice
     \\ (slash@cdrom.tokyo)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jul-2023 23:57:55 JST \\

     in reply to

     • Sexy Moon

     @Moon @feld heck the announcement of office on mac is one of the more important moments in apple history

   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:04:52 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @feld Windows still can only run on x86 and AMD64 (with a ton on x86 cruft).
     
     The ARM builds heavily rely on a x86 JIT for most of the OS (as they can't get it dumpster pile to compile).
     
     
     m$ has had an agreement with apple to provide a version for macos for decades, as they understand that apple has plenty of money to throw at reverse engineering their proprietary office formats and write programs that can semi-reliably read and write them (thus giving freedom enjoyers two different implementations to reverse engineer and use to improve libreoffice), so they opt to provide a office port to keep their iron grip on governments and businesses (although the poor malware authors they employee have to suffer to keep the dumpster fire compiling on multiple architectures).
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:06:19 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @feld Windows still can only run on x86 and AMD64 (with a ton on x86 cruft).
     
     The ARM builds heavily rely on a x86 JIT for most of the OS (as they can't get most of the landfill fire to compile on anything but x86 and AMD64).
     
     
     m$ has had an agreement with apple to provide a version for macos for decades, as they understand that apple has plenty of money to throw at reverse engineering their proprietary office formats and write programs that can semi-reliably read and write them (thus giving freedom enjoyers two different implementations to reverse engineer and use to improve libreoffice), so they opt to provide a office port to keep their iron grip on governments and businesses (although the poor malware authors they employee have to suffer to keep the dumpster fire compiling on multiple architectures).
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:09:23 JST feld

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     > The ARM builds heavily rely on a x86 JIT for most of the OS (as they can't get most of the landfill fire to compile on anything but x86 and AMD64).
     
     Have you actually verified that most of the binaries on ARM Windows builds are in fact x86_64 and not ARM?
     
     Because I'm pretty sure that the core *Windows* software can target ARM just fine, it's all the other software people want to use that has never been built for ARM.
     
     I'm willing to grab an ISO and validate this myself, if I can find one.
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:16:33 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @feld I generally don't download proprietary software to look at unless I have a good reason to.
     
     Sure they would have painstakingly made core windows componentry cross compile to ARM, but as for anything else, I see no reason why they wouldn't have just JIT'd it.
     
     Last time I checked it was 32 bit only, which is quite telling.
     
     
     If you want to go and count precisely how many binaries are ARM and how many are x86, go ahead - I'd love to be proved wrong.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:21:21 JST feld

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     It's ARM64
     
     https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewarm64
     
     
     I'm downloading it now... will take a while to get this booted up and then I'll probably sync the files to my server so I can write my own scripts to walk through it all
   • Embed this notice
     Johnny Peligro (mischievoustomato@marsey.moe)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:27:12 JST Johnny Peligro

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki @feld bruh libreoffice's compatibility sucks ass
     feld likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:34:09 JST feld

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     • PurpCat (V2) (need more art)
     Raymond Chen blog posts are stupid good. I don't give a shit about Windows but this guy seems like a god
   • Embed this notice
     PurpCat (V2) (need more art) (purpcat@marsey.moe)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:34:10 JST PurpCat (V2) (need more art)

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     • PurpCat (V2) (need more art)
     Another MSFT developer who still works there on the port:
     https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210531-00/?p=105265
     
     He also has some other interesting articles about CPU archs, in particular IA64, PPC 60x, Alpha, MIPS R4k, and SuperH for sure. He wrote docs inside MS as well to help them port Windows like these.
   • Embed this notice
     PurpCat (V2) (need more art) (purpcat@marsey.moe)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 00:34:11 JST PurpCat (V2) (need more art)

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     >Sure they would have painstakingly made core windows componentry cross compile to ARM, but as for anything else, I see no reason why they wouldn't have just JIT'd it.
     
     https://aarongiles.com/programming/war-microsoft/
     
     It's not JIT, period. Windows RT had zero x86 compatibility features and ditto with WP8, and one of the porters (who is also a well known emudev) has said on his website in part how he did it.
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:02:44 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • Johnny Peligro
     @mischievoustomato Care to tell me what you're smoking?
     
     I was specifically writing about how libreoffice could do with improvements, not that it's perfect anyway.
     
     
     Libreoffice has displayed for me all office documents that I've come across despite how hard microsoft has attended to sabotage such thing from occurring with every means available.
     
     Many documents are now visually identical.
     
     Less commonly, the spacing differs, but fixing that up isn't much of an issue.
     
     The only real flaw I've found in libreoffice's compatibility is with macros (custom macros, not proprietary ones), but in those cases, I get the feeling that if one or two imperfect handling were fixed the macros would work.
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:16:31 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • PurpCat (V2) (need more art)
     @PurpCat I tried to read that article, but it refuses to let me read it unless I run proprietary software.
     
     I wasn't writing about windows RT, I was thinking of windows 10 ARM, seems I may have misremembered things from windows RT as being the case with windows 10 ARM.
     
     
     Looking as the Wikipedia article on windows RT, as far as I can see, they seem to have barely managed to port cut down core components of windows as well as office and a few more boring pieces of software. As detailed, it seems that such version of losedows sucked even more than usual, as it would only run specifically ported ARM versions of software?
     
     
     Windows 10 ARM seems to JIT all the things, as detailed in this article (which sadly lacks technical details): https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-windows-10-arm-desktop-apps-support-qualcomm
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:20:28 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • Johnny Peligro
     @mischievoustomato I would personally recommend seeing if you can strip out any sensitive information from the files (very hard to do) and submitting them to the libreoffice developers with a screenshot as to what it "should" look like, so bug-for-bug compatibility can be improved.
     
     That sadly requires office, but it's acceptable to run it on someone else's computer who already has it installed for the sole purpose of getting rid of it.
   • Embed this notice
     Johnny Peligro (mischievoustomato@marsey.moe)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:20:29 JST Johnny Peligro

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     I have had to deal with MSO documents, and I have to use either OnlyOffice or LibreOffice depending on which renders the document properly. You might've been lucky though
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:31:11 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • Phantom Palladium
     @hazlin Libreoffice runs like crap on all OS's unless you compile it from source with -march=native really, but of course m$ is carefully sabotaging libreoffice on windows in a plausibly deniable way by making it run extra badly sometimes.
     
     
     It's all well and good to recommend GNU/systemd to people (please don't confuse them by naming the systemd OS after a mostly irrelevant, but required part), but you should also note that the GNU OS was written so the users could have freedom, not so much so that freedom could be surrendered to proprietary bing bing wahoo's (although you can do that) and that they *will* sometimes run into issues, but such issues are almost always intentional sabotage from proprietary software companies that don't want you to have freedom.
   • Embed this notice
     Phantom Palladium (hazlin@amala.schwartzwelt.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 01:31:12 JST Phantom Palladium

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     • Johnny Peligro
     @Suiseiseki @mischievoustomato The only real issue I've had with Libreoffice, is it is obvious that MS patches windows to keep it running like crap on windows. It would have been very easy for me to get some people moved from windows to linux if I could have gotten them used to Libreoffice on windows first.