David Weise leaves
Farewell to one of the great ones. I must be getting old, I remember ralph, aaron, david and all those Windows folks. I wasn't in the Windows group at the time, but met them later post the Windows 3.0 shipment when Jonro got me into the Windows group. Thank you JOn!
Yesterday was the last day at Microsoft for David Weise...
...He (along with Murray Sargent, creator of the SST debugger) also figured out how to get normal Windows applications running in protected mode.
Which totally and utterly and irrevocably blew apart the 640K memory barrier.
I remember wandering over to the Windows group over in Building 3 to talk to Aaron Reynolds about something to do with the MS-DOS redirector (I was working on DOS Lan Manager at the time). I ran into David, and he called me into his office "Hey, look at what I've got working!".
He showed me existing windows apps running in protected mode on the 286. UNMODIFIED Windows 1.0 applications running in protected mode.
He then ran me around the rest of the group, and they showed me the other stuff they were working on. Ralph had written a new driver architecture called VxD. Aaron had done something astonishing (I'm not sure what). They had display drivers that could display 256 color bitmaps on the screen (the best OS/2 could do at the time was 16 colors).