The Old New Thing

A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

A limited number of seats at the Windows 95 launch were available to the product team, so there was a lottery to see who would get one of those tickets. The remainder of the team would be standing on bleachers hidden behind the stage, to be unveiled at the grand climax of the product launch festivities. I happened to have been a winner ...

Buying an entire Egghead Software store

During the development of Windows 95 (which released to the public ten years ago today), application compatibility was of course a very high priority. To make sure that coverage was as broad as possible, the development manager for Windows 95 took his pick-up truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead ...

Why are icons multiples of 8 pixels in width?

Icons are all multiples of eight pixels in width. It's not just because computer people like powers of two. Back in the early days of Windows, video cards were monochrome or, if you were lucky, 16-color. These were all planar video modes, the mechanics of which were discussed earlier. Now imagine copying a bitmap to the screen where both ...

How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”?

The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year's PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place on which program consumes less ...

This might be for real, even though it comes out at 7am

One of our researchers IM'd me yesterday to let me know that someone she interviewed mentioned that some people suspected that I wasn't real because most of my posts are published at the same time every day. I dunno. The evening news comes on at the same time every day, but I'm pretty sure they're real. Maybe I should be more suspicious. ...

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

Thirteen. In case you were wondering. And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. (I...

Justifiable assault with folding chair

Everybody's lunchtime conversation a few days ago was the riot at a used laptop sale in Richmond, VA. [Local coverage.] What got me was this fellow Jesse Sandler: "I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,'" the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on ...

Let’s just make up some dollar values and print them as fact

Everybody is going nuts over a patent decision regarding the iPod interface, but that's not what I'm writing about (so don't ask me for my opinion). Rather, I'm reacting to the claims being made by many people that Apple will have to pay Microsoft $10 for every iPod. What I want to know is where this amount "$10" came from. Multiple ...

What I’ll be doing at this year’s PDC

I will be heading down to Los Angeles the Friday before the PDC in order to visit friends and relatives and to check out the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The last time Tutankhamun came to the United States was back in the late 1970's. I was an elementary school student and a few of my classmates were lucky enough...