And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old.

I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.

I bet the author doesn't know about FTP's ASCII mode, and especially doesn't know that it is the default.

ASCII mode was a nifty feature, but it never should have been the default. Especially when you consider that most text files are small and easy to re-download if you forget, while binary files are often quite large and the damage done by the line ending conversion is close to impossible to repair. Also, if you forget to convert a text file you can trivially do it on the host afterward.

Gold.

Back when I was making videogames I followed a similar philosophy. No warnings (but in an orders-of-magnitude smaller and less complex codebase). Crash on failed asserts, used liberally, in debug builds. Not sure why but it seems that gamedev doesn't do this kind of rigorous engineering in general (or at least it didn't back then -- and admittedly I never worked in a big studio).

Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936274

id also decided no more DOS games around that time (well, maybe a year later)

> For Id Software to develop a game, a dll will be most efficient. We have more cpu power, and we can debug it more easily. We are directing significant effort towards making Quake 2 a better GAME, as well as just a better mutliplayer virtual world. Quake 1 was pretty messed up from a game standpoint, and we don't plan on doing that again.

> Speaking of portability, to remove the guesswork that goes on, here are my current opinions on the various platforms:

> Win32 > Win32 rules the world. You are sticking your head in the sand if you think otherwise. The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 / NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on win32 first. Our games should run as well as possible in NT, we won't require any '95 only features.

> DOS > We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers, etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it.

> Linux > I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id. From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked, linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP, but I have a lot of technical respect for it.

> NeXTStep > My favorite environment. NT and linux both have advantages in some areas, but if they were on equal footing I would choose NEXTSTEP hands down. It has all the power of unix (there are lots of things I miss in NT), the best UI (IMHO, of cource), and it just makes sense on so many more levels than windows. Yes, you can make windows do anything you want to if you have enough time to beat on it, but you can come out of it feeling like you just walked through a sewer.

> In the real world, things aren't on equal footing, and I do most of my work on NT now. I hold out hope that it may not stay that way. If apple Does The Right Thing with rhapsody, I will be behind them as much as I can. NEXTSTEP needs a couple things to support games properly (video mode changing and low level sound access). If apple/next will provide them, I will personally port our current win32 products over.

> If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody, I would be very likely to give my win NT machine the cold shoulder and do future development on rhapsody. (I really don't need Quickdraw3D evangelists preaching to me right now, thank you)