Undocumented Windows
by Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, Matt Pietrek · first published 1992
14mentions
3recommended by
14HN commenters
2013–2026first – last mentioned
21% recommend79% neutral
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…the birth and death of many good products that have been killed by Microsoft tactics (dr dos, stacker, framemaker, borland C++, ...). One of my most usefull book at that time was http://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micro.... Many people have lost a lot of time because of the monopoly of Microsoft. How much time lost because of IE6 ? I have lost a lot of time between 1999 and 2002 because visual C++ was…
on “An exclusive interview with Bill Gates” ↗…originally a layer on top DOS which was written in assembly language. Being a "layer" or not was the subject of a very complex federal antitrust case back in the 90s. You can read "Undocumented DOS" and "Undocumented Windows" for some weird kind of technical investigation thriller which I found weirdly fascinating back in the day.
on “Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan” ↗I think they learned by reading books such as Undocumented Windows or Windows Internals (not to be confused with Windows NT internals), and Microsoft documents. In fact, I’d argue it was more fun than programming Javascript these days.
on “Win16 Memory Management” ↗It is used in windows 3.1 and explained in "undocument windows" https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micr...
on “A Sampling of Anti-Decompilation Techniques” ↗…amount of time reverse engineering other Windows apps and Windows itself, along with people like Matt Pietrek and Andrew Schulman. Andrew in particular would have devoted an entire chapter of his book Undocumented Windows to the text-based system you describe. It would be a field day for him! Also consider memory limitations and programmer time. Remember that Windows 1.0 ran (slowly) on a machine with 256KB memory and…
on “VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment” ↗…software, and its progression through Windows/386 -> 3.0 -> 3.11 -> 95. They don't go behind the scenes (ie they're not Showstopper!) - Pietrek - Windows Internals (1993) Schulman, Maxie, Pietrek - Undocumented Windows (1992) Pietrek - Windows 95 System Programming Secrets (1995) Schulman - Unauthorized Windows 95 (1994) Oney - Systems Programming for Windows 95 (Microsoft Press, 1996) Williams - DOS and…
on “The Windows 3.1 Virtual Machine Control Block Part 1 (1994)” ↗…performant way, Undocumented API calls were rumored to be a big deal even back in the Windows 3.x days. I remember reading through this at the time looking for the 'smoking gun'. https://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micr... There were some cute and offensive names, and a few interesting details about the internal implementation of Windows, but nothing that would've been hugely beneficial. Things might…
on “How Microsoft faked errors in Windows 3 on top of DR DOS” ↗Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is one of the books that tells which person was it. "Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk" https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340 Pity as SOM was much better alternative…
on “The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)” ↗…to read your printf logs to find where approximately the program stopped. I spent a sizeable amount of my scholarship money on Microsoft Systems Journals, Charles Petzolds "Programming Windows" and "Undocumented Windows". The latter would teach you tricks like saving the Window position in an INI file so you could make it reappear in the same place where it was closed...
on “Building Win16 GUI Applications in C (2014)” ↗…time ago, written by an engineer in India. He became famous in India(or at least in my city, Pune, where he lived) for reverse engineering Windows NT. He along with his friends later on wrote the book "Undocumented Windows NT". He was promptly hired by Microsoft, and moved to the US. He later wrote an article on his experience working for Microsoft. One thing I vividly remember from that article was his experience the very…
on “Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)” ↗No. It's on the bookshelf next to Petzold, and below the other Petzold book, that I suspect far fewer have read, on the shelf above. On the other side of the Lower Petzold is Undocumented Windows. If you deduced from this that the shelves were divided into Windows and OS/2, the sad truth is that the lower shelf is slightly too high, and the books are divided by height differences that amount…
on “How Microsoft faked errors in Windows 3 on top of DR DOS” ↗…discovered the dirty tricks Microsoft used to hobble Windows betas on DR-DOS, using similar techniques. This was at Ralph Nader's Appraising Microsoft conference in 1997. It's covered in another of his books, Undocumented Windows. Impressive work, and very brave at the time.
on “A blast from the past: Disassembling DOS (2020)” ↗Well, that takes me back! There are other well-produced books in the same series - anyone remember "Undocumented Windows"?
on “Windows++: C++ Application Framework for Windows by Paul DiLascia” ↗The answers at your link explain pretty well what kind of APIs these were and they provide sources, e.g. the several books that have been published under titles like "Undocumented Windows ...". There were no magic APIs, just ordinary functions that covered various features not yet implemented in the publicly available Win32 API. Keep in mind also that the Windows kernel system calls were…
on “Microsoft's 1986 IPO” ↗