davepl1968
This flame mail crossed my inbox at Microsoft not long after I moved to the NT team sometime in early 94. It's a classic and served to set the tone for me, at least!
mark lucovsky
Now I feel kinda bad… NT (aka Windows) could have had this in 1994, BUT I slammed that door shut because we were ~6 weeks away from releasing Daytona (NT 3.5) The official “Since your so fucking smart” email that has somehow been attached to me for life :) Alias Key: johnc - John Colleran ran the User team mikeab - Micheal Abrash - knew a thing or two about pixels… ntdev - the entire Windows NT team virginia - don’t remember >From markl Thu Aug 4 09:44:06 1994 X-MSMail-Message-ID: CF9F2452 X-MSMail-Parent-message-ID: 5C4F9C01 X-MSMail-Conversation-ID: 5C4F9C01 To: erikgav, johnc, mikeab Date: Thu, 4 Aug 94 09:40:26 TZ Subject: RE: ye butt-ugly bitmap Cc: ntdev, virginia ---------- | From: Erik Gavriluk <erikgav@microsoft.com> | To: johnc; markl; mikeab | Cc: ntdev; virginia | Subject: ye butt-ugly bitmap | Date: Wednesday, August 03, 1994 10:26PM | | If you want to fix this, it involves removing some of the | technical constraints from the graphic design team. | Currently, they're screwed because they're stuck doing this | with the standard VGA palette. | | 3) "The marlettmar" | | Take the time out to fix the whole NT startup sequence, which | is incredibly, err, "butt-ugly." (Who said that?) Or at | least fix the parts we can. After we inflict the user with | BIOS copyrights, the silly NTLDR menu, flash "press SHIFT now | to invoke the LAST KNOWN...", turn the screen blue, show | pointless disk information, flash lightning bolts on the | screen (for you ATI users only) then turn the screen sea-foam | green, we can't really take the graphic designers to task for | an imperfect bitmap. It's not like they've ruined a | visually-pleasing boot sequence, now, is it? | | None of these are new; they're just prioritized out of each | release. Any takers? If the to: line can't pull strings and | do it, if someone on the cc: line can get a showstopper | approved and assigned to me, I'll go do it. Erik, Since your so fucking smart, why don't you just come over here and fix it for us. Since we have not been able to do what you suggest for the last five years in a portable cross platform way, maybe you could just do it for us. Your bug is 22575. You have until RC2 to get this right. Make sure you test this on all platforms and machine configurations, and also make sure your cool new shit works in the setup environment. Try not to let this bug slip your cool new shell schedule. I hear that you might have this ready for us sometime in 1997 ? -markl p.s. - Erik, flaming to ntdev isn't a cool idea. Lots of people receive this mail. If you want to call someone incompetent, private mail is usually a better idea. Since this isn't your style, take this ! Please also make sure you keep ntdev informed of the status of bug 22575. We are all waiting to see the results of your efforts.