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CTOnews.com December 27 News What do you think is the worst software product in Microsoft history? According to Raymond Chen, Microsoft's chief software engineer, it is OS / 2 for Mach 20. He detailed his views in a post on Microsoft's official developer blog.

He wrote in his article:

In the mid-1980s, Microsoft produced an expansion card for IBM PCs and PC XT called Mach 10. In addition to taking up expansion slots, the Mach 10 also needs to replace your CPU: you need to unplug the old, broken 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and plug a special adapter into the empty socket, which connects back to the Mach 10 card via a ribbon cable. 9.54 MHz 8086 CPU used on Mach 10 extensions.

With Mach 10 extensions, consumers can get 2x the performance boost at a much lower cost than IBM PC AT. The Mach 10 also comes with a mouse port, so you can add a mouse without an extra expansion slot.

After the failure of Mach 10, Microsoft partnered with Portable Computer Support Group to launch a successor expansion card, Mach 20, in 1987. Portable Computer Support Group is best known for its disk caching software Lightning.

The Mach 20 uses the same basic concept as the Mach 10, requiring users to unplug the old 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and connect it to the Mach 20 expansion slot via a ribbon cable. The Mach 20 comes with an 8 MHz 80286 CPU and, like the Mach 10, it has a built-in mouse port.

A key detail is that all of these extensions connect directly to the main Mach 20 board, so they don't take up valuable expansion slots. The IBM PC comes with five expansion slots, but the number of ports in the real scenario is tight. You'll need one controller for the hard drive, one controller for the floppy drive, one for the video card, one for the printer parallel port, and one for the mouse.

Microsoft also customized OS / 2 for Mach 20. Despite being tailor-made for Mach 20, it still has serious performance issues.

A former colleague of mine spoke to the person who succeeded him as OS / 2 support specialist for Mach 20. According to that person's memory, a total of 11 copies of OS / 2 for Mach 20 were sold, 8 of which were returned.

CTOnews.com learned that Raymond Chen is probably the most interesting Microsoft programmer, not only because he has served Microsoft faithfully for more than ten years-an unusual seniority, but also because he has diligently written a "black history" about the company and Windows development and production, and has published a book on it with Microsoft official support. Much of the book can be found on his official blog at MSDN,"The Old New Thing."

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