"Disruption" comes to the world of junior academia. It was inevitable. Nothing's sacred.

Server 2003 was the last release supervised by Cutler, so would have my vote. It's even source-available... technically.

Cutler himself wrote code for Vista/Longhorn though. I don't know what you mean by "supervising" it. He also led the efforts for "PatchGuard" kernel protection mechanism that was introduced with Vista.

Source: I reviewed Cutler's lock-free data structure changes in Vista/Longhorn to find bugs in them, failed to find any.

AH, I was repeating something I read elsewhere, but I'll defer to an eyewitness. Must've been pretty cool working on Windows back then. Maybe it was more varied than my line of work. I must escape the drudgery B2B SaaS Webcrapps.

Sometimes I install Office 97 for kicks and marvel at how much I can do with it, yet it asks so little of my system. <2Mb RAM for Word 97!

Same here. I have a physical copy of Word 97, although TBH I use the classic licence key 11111-111111111 to "activate" it because it's easier.

It runs fine under WINE, and you can install the 3 service packs for it too. As released, when you try to save a .RTF file it actually doesn't. Not that that matters, but it's nice to have all the known the bug fixes.

It runs inside the L2 cache on any modern-ish CPU. Even on a Core 2 Duo, it's fast.

It is hilarious and sad to recall that when it came out -- I was working for PC Pro magazine around then -- it was seen as big and bloated and sluggish compared to Office 95. The Mac version, Office 98, was a port of the Windows version, and Mac owners hated it.

Now, it's tiny and sleek.

Same, I used to use Office 2003 because it was so quick and the UI was exactly what you needed.

On later versions they had animated cursor positions which felt slow, the spellcheck squiglies were lethargic and menus convoluted.

That said, I've given up and mostly use Google Docs/Sheets now because of the features and cross platform support.

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity is just that, except it's a whole OS that's Win2k styled. If it ever gets good hardware support it might have a chance.

Or maybe ReactOS - the actual windows clone - gets finished. Rumours put a first release date some time after Hurd.

> https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity is just that, except it's a whole OS that's Win2k styled.

It's a Unix underneath, though. A strange modernised Unix written in C++ but it's definitely Unix-like.

It's a Unix-like with a Win2K GUI, which is a pretty attractive combination, TBH...

Have they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!

There's another project, P3OL, that's also closed-source. I assume they're connected somehow.

P3OL makes 100€/month through Patreon, I guess that is also this project's reason to stay closed-source

There was Nina too and then they destroyed the discord over a weirdo pedo mod and took down the website. Also closed source because they’re also selfish.

The absolute state of FOSS communities in 2025. I'd rather teh good old days of pedantry, swearing and trolling instead.

Why wouldn't a project like this be OSS? How do they expect to monetize? People buying dialtone subscriptions as a social network?

Besides monetization there are other factors for not open sourcing.

* fear of being critizied for bad code

* not wanting to deal with contributions

* license compliance (maybe using something commercial, maybe trying to hide bad license usage)

* trying to keep control

* missing understanding of open source in general

* ...

So what is the idea with something then? Build software and...?

I'm unable to find the server, but it looks like they've released some protocol analysis tooling: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap

Every browser developer should be forced to take an annual pilgrimage to this gravestone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)

1. Take normal browser

2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively"

3. ???

4. Profit!

I wrote 100,000 LOC using Grok, where's my christmas bonus?

It's an abortive attempt at parody. Could've just said "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" and we could at least enjoy the throwback.

Yo, thanks for the throwback [1] XD

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f8/Interne...

Linguistic decay. First they came for our adverbs, now they're attacking our comparative adjectives.

IBM won the long game. They secretly acquired Apple, but you weren't meant to know that yet. Not even Tim Cook knows. Big Blue's lawyers will be writing politely to the author of this project, and teaming up with the gutted remains of Nullsoft to sue them for copyright infringement.