All right, let's take a look at chapter two. Now, chapter two is interesting in the fact that what they're really trying to do is give you a basis for where all this stuff came from. And boy, do they go into some detail.
They really do. What I'm going to do in this video is try to help you understand why it evolved the way it did and fill in some of the gaps because they really do. It's one of those we won the war things, right? And so we're only talking about those that actually won. We're not talking or exist today.
We're not talking about all the other stuff. And I'm not going to pollute your mind with a bunch of stuff that you don't need to know. What I'm going to try to do is help you understand where all of this technology came from as we move through the years. And, you know, I love that stuff.
I really do. But a lot of people don't see any need or use. And the truth is, is that, yeah, you can get through understanding Windows 10 and 11 and never know any of this, right? But will you understand what's happening as you use Windows 11 and it moves to 12, even though they said there would never be another operating system past 10, that, you know, will you understand why that's happening? And again, you don't need to, to actually use it.
That's the truth. But you do receive a bunch of benefits by understanding that process of technology developing and moving through our society if this is your career, right? Because you can see, I don't know how many people I've talked to and they just can't get so... I talk to my brother a lot because at least he can talk to me about what we're both seeing. where I could talk to somebody that uses this technology all the time.
They actually troubleshoot the technology. They support the technology. But when I say, well, you know, they're going to have to do something in Windows 10 about, they're like, what? And then, of course, they do.
And they come out with something else. And so having that information in my head is very, very, very useful in the career of technology. So just quickly, yeah, MS-DOS. So Microsoft-DOS started out as IBM-DOS. And they called that PC DOS.
And there was many versions. And this one was purchased. So they purchased the very first DOS because Microsoft wasn't doing operating systems at that time, believe it or not. And during that time, you really had a couple of things could have happened. We could have been where we are much earlier.
And by that, what I mean is compatibility between the information I use and the information you use is handled on an application basis. For instance, if I'm using Word and I know you're not using Word, I could still send you a Word file and chances are your document editor, whatever you're using, would open it. But I could just send you a PDF.
I could send you an RTF file. I could send you just a flat out text file. No problem.
You're going to get it and be able to use it. So it's happening at the application level. Back then, that wasn't happening.
It should have developed that way, but it took, you know, we went through late 70s all the way through about the early 2000s is when it started to happen. And it could have happened a long time ago. So back then you had some, again, why do you buy a computer? You buy a computer to do the things you need to do. In the beginning, that wasn't there.
So people programmed them themselves. But. Once some enterprising people had built some awesome programs, they started to sell them.
So WordPerfect becomes a big standard. Lotus 1-2-3 becomes a big standard. That's a spreadsheet.
Those become big standards. And as those people then move those to, I can run Lotus 1-2-3 on my Mac. I can run it on an IBM compatible or MS-DOS machine, as they would have said. I can run it on my Amiga computer. Right then.
The files match up. It doesn't matter which system I'm using, the files match up. But how do I get my AmigaDone Lotus 1.2.3 spreadsheet over to an MS-DOS Lotus 1.2.3 spreadsheet? So the file's the same, but how do I get it over there?
There's no networking. There's no internet. There is, but we're not using them. It's not developed enough.
How do I get it to... Huh. I gotta buy special software. I actually may even have to buy special hardware to make that work. Well, the computer was already freaking dang expensive.
Now I gotta buy more? What I should have done is just bought an IBM computer or compatible because that's what I use at work. And then I wouldn't have that problem, even though the Lotus 1-2-3 on the Amiga was an incredible piece of software compared to what they could do on an MS-DOS computer that was so far limited. Didn't matter.
Right. So the files are compatible, but that would happen, you know, with only those big major products. And then the file formats for the.
The disks were not. So the hardware reading the disks was different in many cases. And how it was reading the disk and making it work were different in many cases.
And that always meant that you had to buy something else to make sure you could transfer files back and forth. Awful. Now, the one thing that this was controlled by, right, the underlying control of what's happening within this MS-DOS world is super powerful processor.
Massive processing speeds. uh more ram so you can do these d base and one two three files but everything else is non-existent so oh you'd like some graphics with even 16 colors that'll cost you a few hundred dollars more where on other like commodore side of things the that was built in that was all built in on processors that were much much less powerful right so the focus on this side of things was these massive processors that could go really quickly with large amounts of data. And then on the other side of things, you had, oh, we're giving you color and we're giving you sound.
But our processor is not as awesome. And you think, well, why not? Why not make it awesome? Well, we just increased the cost a lot, right? Everything was really expensive back then.
And so it's about focusing that money. And business didn't need all the graphics. They were just happy that they could write documents. store spreadsheets and have a database that kept track of the video rentals, that kind of stuff, right?
That's all they cared about. And so they focused a lot on that. Now, why mention all that?
Because as you look at what DOS did, crap, over the years, it didn't do much of anything, right? They're bringing out different versions that barely provide any kind of better functionality as it goes through. And it's like, wow, how long did it take them to implement something so stupid as that?
That shouldn't that have been like a few weeks? That's what was happening over there because, again, the focus, they couldn't do anything with graphics. So by the time you get to Windows 3.1 in 1992, machines are starting to have actual colors.
That sounds really sad. You know, you start in the 70s, like 77, and then you move forward to, let's just say, 97. 20 years it takes them to get to the point where they're actually doing multitasking and they're actually doing color. And most of that's because hardware manufacturers are not doing that because people aren't buying it for those reasons. They're buying it because they need to run Lotus 1.2.3 that runs in Microsoft DOS.
And they're selling Buku's amount of that stuff. And so why would you add anything new? It's not something that you need to do.
So hearkening back to my 100-170 class, it's about compatibility. It's about interoperability coming later. But I need to be compatible with these systems.
All the others fluff. Sounds, graphics, all the other stuff is fluff. And so they go all the way through.
I mean, you didn't even get plug and play until Windows 98. They actually added plug and play in 95, but it didn't work. We called it plug and pray. And then, of course, gaming was huge on all these other systems because they included, by that time, powerful processors, powerful graphics. And they could do all that stuff. But on Windows, you couldn't do that.
And Microsoft wasn't in control of that. They did not design a machine until later on when they really started to lose ground to Apple. And that didn't happen until, you know, 2010. And so ActiveX was part of that, like, oh, we need graphics.
So let's put that in. And then they came out with probably one of the worst things they've ever done. There's a registry editor. Let me pull it up and bring it over onto the screen. And let's take a look at what the registry is.
So they got to a point when they're dealing with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 was a big switch to where it's like, how do you keep track of how big this window is or how big this window is? If you've ever noticed, if you. minimize your browser window and then close it.
The next time you start it, it comes up in that little. that little mode usually. If that's not a good example to you, then do it in File Manager, that definitely will do it. Well, that information is stored in this massive database that they call the registry.
They call it the registry because that's where programs will register what they need and how they want things to work. Now, Linux and Unix, they don't do this registry thing. What they do is what has always been done, which is these little config text files.
And so these little config text files exist usually in a special folder within the operating system or within that particular program's folder. So that way, if you're on a Mac, say, and you're using Excel, you double click the Excel icon. That would actually be in that folder and it would tell it this is how to open up the window. These were the last things that were done. All that stuff happens in a little text file.
Well, in Windows 3.1, it was getting really crazy with these text files. Programmers were, they weren't keeping track of what they're doing. So basically, Microsoft, in my opinion, did a very bad thing.
And they basically were like, you know, programmers aren't controlling this. Coders aren't controlling this. So let's move this direction where they have to.
So programmers were the lazy ones. They were the ones saying, oh, this time I'll put it in the folder. This time I'll put it in the special folder.
This time I'll put it in that other folder. Not joking, having dealt with it back then, you would end up with three different config files, and you had to figure out which one was the one controlling the errors that were happening on the screen. So they went to this instead. And again, most of the other operating systems stayed with the way they did it.
Now, the reason that the way they did it really was nice is the fact on a Mac, and I'm not joking, if you had a problem where a program wasn't opening, you could just go and delete this text file. Every single program has a default text file that it'll generate and put it where it's supposed to be if it can't find one. So if you delete any of those little text files, it's no big deal. The default just kicks in and pushes this little file in.
That usually fixes the problem. I'm not joking. You have a problem that, hey, this program won't open. All you got to do is delete that plist file and boom, there you go.
It's back to normal most of the time. Right. So. In Windows, we don't do that, right? There's no text files.
What there is, is all of these keys. So this is the current user, meaning whoever's logged in. This is class's root, which is usually the easiest to explain, because as you look down through here, right, there's an AVI file. In other words, if I look and I'm loading a program as Windows, I'm not loading a program, I'm loading a file as Windows.
I look at that extension and go, that's an AVI file and according to my settings in the registry, I will load this, it's associated with this. This is Windows Media Player 11, that's what it's associated with. You know that you could right-click an AVI file and say open it with this other thing instead. Basically, all that's correlated through this big directory, which is awesome.
That is really, really awesome. You will find MP3s in here, MP4s in here, you'll find doc. docx, anything that it needs to understand with these.
That's why classes root is usually the easiest to explain to students because they've seen those extensions. JPG is in there, all of it's in there, and they all have some kind of setting or value. Now I'm also going to tell you programmers, if you're really into programming, you usually don't set any of those. You just do it in your creation.
I just forgot the term. IDE, yes, in your IDE, and it sets it all. You don't have to do it at all.
So that's classes root. Local machine is what is running here, right? What desktop settings do I have?
And you will also note that if I go to current user, because if you're a hacker, then you're thinking, oh, current user, let me get into current user, and I can start messing with stuff. And they're going to protect anything that happens to be. Actually, let me go to users.
I don't know who these people are. That's not showing me anything. I don't know if that's me that's logged in or that's the admin.
They encrypt it so you can't really see that stuff. So you're dealing with hacking that's protected in that way. And then here's the current config.
Right. So whatever's running and that's helpful because of plug and play where I change the desktop, I change the color, I change the font. That's the current config. And when you basically after a certain amount of time these days, if you shut down, then it's going to save the current config back to your user. right back to the configuration of that particular user.
So the registry handles all that. And that's great and wonderful. The problem, the negativity of the registry is the fact when something gets screwed up, this is where you have to delete it. And if you don't know what you're doing, you can kill everything.
Notice there's no save. Notice under edit, there's no undo. So to give you an example, programmers still get lazy.
And you say to yourself, you know, I tried this little media program and I don't like it. So I'm going to uninstall it. That'll save space on my computer, right? That's why people do it.
Well, most of those programs don't delete any of these keys, any of these little values that are in here. They just leave it in there. And so that's one of the reasons why you're like, huh, I installed that media program and it took like three minutes to get that installed.
That's a long time in digital time, right? But when I uninstalled it, it took 25 seconds. Yeah, because all they did is went and deleted all the files on the system, or not even all of them, just some of them.
And then they left all their keys that they had that three minutes of creating. They left those sitting in there. And at this point, you should be thinking, so what's the big deal? They left them in there. That's not a big deal.
This registry has to load every time you load Windows. So if you've ever wondered why, especially if you're dealing with 7 and previous, so it was really bad then. You load up Windows 7 and man, that thing is snappy.
You installed it yesterday and then you do all the updates and it's just working great. And then about four months later, oh, it's starting to bog down. Six months later, it's really bogging down.
Every time you install something, every time something's updated, something changes in the registry. These people don't delete what they need to. then the registry becomes this bloated thing.
Now, some of you at this point are going, oh, use CCleaner, use, right? There's these other things that clean that out. And those can be helpful. But as you've seen here, it can also be very, very dangerous to do. And sometimes CCleaner will really screw stuff up because it guesses wrong, right?
That's what it's doing. It's looking in the registry and going, I don't see the corresponding file. So I'll go ahead and delete, not realizing that was used with something else too.
So. That's why you see problems with that as well. So basically, just to understand, computer boot time getting into Windows is heavily dependent on how compact and small this registry is.
If you're very careful about what you're installing on your computer, then you're not bloating this registry. It's not happening, and so it'll always boot pretty dang quickly. But the more you install on your machine, even if you uninstall it, again, those uninstalls do not do what they need to do.
That creates another issue. And that issue is we'll use Microsoft. Microsoft's really good at this now.
So they're kind of a poor example to use. As a matter of fact, let's use something that most people install. We'll use Chrome.
So you install Chrome and everything's working right. And there's lots of reasons Chrome can be slow. It's kind of a resource hog.
But in any case, it was working. And now all of a sudden it's not. So it opens up. It never loads anything and it's just got blank pages.
And no matter what you do, you can't get it to work. So what you decide to do is uninstall it. You uninstall it, then you load it back in. And it's the same problem. How did that happen?
How did not uninstalling it not fix it? Well, that's because they didn't take the registry stuff out. They left all these bogus settings that have been corrupted by something and they're all sitting in there.
And when you load Chrome back in, it looks in the registry and goes, hey, we can save this user some time. I already see my keys are created, so I won't create them again. Big problem, right? If I'm reinstalling something, all that should have been deleted from the uninstall.
And then when the reinstall happens, it looks and says the keys aren't there. Create the keys again. Now the problem's fixed.
That is why I explained to you on Unix, on Linux, and those things, they use these little list files, P list files on a Mac, and they're just a text file. So when they reinstall, if they didn't delete that P list file on a Mac, then you'll still have the same problem when you reinstall that program. But it's a lot easier just to delete the P list file because it's in the directory where you installed it to begin with.
right so when you uninstall something on the mac you throw it in the trash can and i'll do that in a different video all that gets chucked and then when you reinstall it it's i gotta reinstall it it's brand new on a windows machine it should do that but they don't force the programmers to do that therefore a reinstall may not fix a problem Instead, what you end up having to do then is come in and find the key for that and delete the key so that when the program starts to reinstall, it goes, oh, those keys aren't there. And it puts the keys back in brand new. Hey, magic.
The problem goes away. And so there's definitely some problems with using this registry method. And I like to point them out, not because I'm trying to slam on Microsoft, but this is stuff you have to do in troubleshooting.
You have to understand that everything that you're seeing on this computer is stored in a registry setting. So the file itself is not stored there. Word is not in this registry. But the settings for how Word is going to load, the files it's associated with, all that is in the registry. You run into trouble troubleshooting that stuff.
You will think this is going back to the registry. How to remove blah, blah, blah registry. And there's your answer on the Internet, right?
So that is Windows. We're going to stop with that because, yeah, they went on and better stuff, and they added more stuff, expanded plug-and-play support. That means it actually worked in 98. We can go on and on and all the different things.
And the only other thing you need to know is that Windows 95 and all of that stuff, all the way up to Windows ME, that was all from DOS. So what they did was they created a disk operating system, and then they put a graphical overlay on top of it called Windows. So Windows wasn't really the core of the operating system. DOS still was.
And they created that all the way through, and they had no security at all because DOS didn't have any security or any way to deal with any of that. All the way down to the file system, it couldn't do it. And so they created another one for workstations for people that were at work, and they were really doing stuff that was all secure.
and Windows NT, they hire a Unix guy to create Windows NT, and that's where everything comes from. So Windows NT then gets evolved into Windows 2000, into Windows XP, into Windows Vista, into Windows 8, I mean 7, then 8, and then people think they skipped 9 and went straight to 10, but really if you look at how it's actually laid out, Windows 10 is actually Windows 10. Windows 8 was actually Windows 9. It's all marketing crap. This was different.
So same interface. They made it look the same, but the underlying technology was totally different. So everything you're using as far as Windows goes comes from the Windows NT portion, not the Windows 95 portion. All right.
So again, you got questions and concerns. Let me know. That's just the portion of Windows.
We'll take a look at the other ones in a second.