The Old New Thing

If you squint you might be able to make out my name

August 26, 2005 Aug 26, 2005 08/26/05
Raymond Chen
Late Tuesday night, Jenny Lam, the creative director for this year's PDC, came by our hallway and asked for permission to rummage through our offices for "stuff". They were looking for props to use to decorate a developer's cubicle in a video they were filming for the conference. I was able to loan her a framed letter of appreciation and my ...

Windows 95 crashes a cash register

August 25, 2005 Aug 25, 2005 08/25/05
Raymond Chen
Not everything related to the Windows 95 launch went well. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a local CompUSA store found that their cash registers crashed at midnight, forcing eager customers to wait ninety minutes before the problem could be resolved. The cause: A bug in the cash register software which had lain undiscovered because ...

Marymoor Park summer movie series 2005 is nearly over

August 24, 2005 Aug 24, 2005 08/24/05
Raymond Chen
Every Wednesday evening in August of this year, Marymoor Park will be showing a movie. Tonight's movie is Bend It Like Beckham. The movie begins at dusk, and a $5 donation is suggested, proceeds to be shared between the park and a local charity. The charity tends to be thematically related to the movie; for Beckham, for example, part of the ...

A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

August 24, 2005 Aug 24, 2005 08/24/05
Raymond Chen
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

August 24, 2005 Aug 24, 2005 08/24/05
Raymond Chen
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?

August 23, 2005 Aug 23, 2005 08/23/05
Raymond Chen
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”?

August 22, 2005 Aug 22, 2005 08/22/05
Raymond Chen
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

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
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. ...

Justifiable assault with folding chair

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
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...