The Old New Thing

October 8, 2013 - The Old New Thing

I wrote my thesis on an airplane, for heaven's sake

October 8, 2013 Oct 8, 2013 10/8/13
Raymond Chen
As I wrote today's story, I recalled that I wrote the bulk of my thesis on an airplane. In longhand. Microsoft flew me out for an interview, so I had to endure two cross-country plane trips. I scheduled the interview on a Monday so that I would miss only one day of class, and among the things I brought with me was a notepad, which started ...

I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake

October 8, 2013 Oct 8, 2013 10/8/13
Raymond Chen
When you wrote code for 16-bit Windows, one of the things you spent time doing as part of performance tuning was deciding which functions should be grouped together in which segments. Code in 16-bit Windows executed out of code segments, each of which could be up to 64KB in size. When a code segment was loaded from disk, the entire segment ...