August 29th, 2018

Obsolete Microspeak: TDBN and the six-pack

Windows 8 introduced its own code names. Last time we learned about charms, a term which started out as an internal code name but wound up as the public name for the feature.

When you called up the charms bar, a little information box also appeared in the lower left corner of the screen. This showed the time, date, battery status, and network status. The internal name for this information box was TDBN, named after the four things which appear in it: Time, Date, Battery, and Network. It was pronounced tidbin.¹

7∶00
Wednesday
August 29

If you selected Settings from the charms bar, a settings panel slid in, and at the bottom of the settings panel was a block of six icons arranged as follows:

Network Volume Brightness
Notifications Power Keyboard

To wit:

This cluster of six icons was known as the six-pack.

So there’s some useless trivia for you.

¹ Not to be confused with fizzbin.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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