Geoff Chappell has died
twitter.comGeoff was an amazing and unique individual. His depth of knowledge of Windows was unparalleled — he and I spent many a night arguing about the merits of Dave Cutler’s design philosophy, security decisions in modern Windows, and so-forth. Usually we would be doing so over far too much Italian wine, the quality of the arguments would tracking appropriately with the amount of wine consumed. Probably how loud we were, too… weirdest argument to hear in a New York bar in SoHo on a weeknight, I’m sure.
Geoff’s love and knowledge of the Beatles, David Bowie, the Who and other 1960’s and 1970’s British pop was staggering… I love these bands, and he took that passion to another level. I’ll never forget listening to the various mixes of Bowie’s Space Oddity and noticing the subtle nuances Geoff would point out. His huge collection of singles made it easy to discover something new, especially with him curating a journey through his favourites, or even versions that he would express great disdain for! This was only matched by his love of classical music. You’ll see signs of these passions in his musings in his website.
Raise a good glass of wine with friends, have a hell of a party, listen to some great music… a great way to celebrate his life.
I didn't know Geoff, but I have used his website a lot in the past. It is a fountain of knowledge around everything about Windows. I hope that the Internet preserves this knowledge and with it his memory.
RIP Geoff
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=geoffchappell.com
Some threads with comments:
The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36042213 - May 2023 (139 comments)
Kuser_shared_data (Windows Data Structure) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146484 - Oct 2022 (3 comments)
America Online Exploits Bug in Own Software (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198034 - Nov 2021 (27 comments)
Strange Things LINK Knows about 80x86 Processors (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585683 - Dec 2020 (2 comments)
Windows HAL Functions (Hal.dll) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22110073 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
32bit Windows can use more than 3GB of RAM, MS just doesn't want you too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613276 - May 2009 (20 comments)
Here's a mirror in case the original website goes down: https://geoffchappellmirror.github.io/
The ArchiveTeam folks are saving it to archive.org too.
+1, his website on Windows internals is incredible. A great legacy to leave to the world: something that has helped and will continue to help thousands of people
Was just about to say the same thing, and wondering if that site was the same guy. Thanks and RIP to Geoff.
This is sad news. I talked with him a few times on CIX (www.CIX.co.uk) back in the Before Times. A truly brilliant man, who more than once helped to prove that Microsoft lied and attempted to cheat other companies, notably Digital Research.
Can we normalize people posting a readable link like https://nitter.net/travisgoodspeed/status/169871524959395856... as we do for paywalls?