Showing results for History - The Old New Thing

PC Magazine interviewed "the team behind Windows" in commemoration of Windows' twentieth birthday. The article's author talked with Bill Gates, Charles Simonyi, Jeff Raikes, Ray Ozzie (huh? He didn't even work at Microsoft until April 2005! How could he have been part of "the team behind Windows"?), Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, David Cole, Yusuf...

An example, all too frequent, of ways programs assume that the user interface will never change is reaching into system binaries and sucking out undocumented resources. In the shell, we have fallen into the reluctant position of carrying "dead" icons around for the benefit of programs that assumed that they would always be available. However, we of...

Once again, airplane manufacturers have been giving serious consideration to offering Internet access in the skies. Back in 1994, Boeing considered equipping each seat with a serial modem. Laptop users could hook up to the modem and dial out. (Dial-up was the primary means of connecting to the Internet back in those days.) We chuckled at the tho...

Some time ago, I mentioned the dangers of disabling the desktop window. But why is it even possible to disable the desktop anyway? This is simply an artifact of the history of philosophy of Windows operating system design. Back in the old days, memory was tight, hard drives were luxuries, the most popular CPU for the IBM PC didn't have memory...

They thought they were so clever when they named the Desktop Applications Division. "And the abbreviation is 'DAD', isn't that cute? Complements the Microsoft Office Manager toolbar (MOM)." And then the troubles started. Shortly after the new product group was formed, everybody in the product group started getting email talking about strange ...

Michael Kaplan blows the dust off this classic question.

Some people have noticed that if you load a DLL with the flag, you sometimes get strange behavior if you then pass that to a dialog box function. The problem here is that since the bottom 16 bits of a proper are always zero, different components have "borrowed" those bits for different purposes. The kernel uses the bottom bit to distinguish mo...

Back in 1995, I was participating in a chat room on MSN on the subject of device driver development. One of the people in the chat room asked, "Can I write a device driver in Visual Basic?" I replied, "Windows 95 device drivers are typically written in low-level languages such as C or even assembly language." Undaunted, the person clarifi...

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of working in the office next to Danny, a phenomenally talented fellow, not just a stellar programmer but also an accomplished pianist, singer, video game restorer, and skier. I remember when he was working on DirectSound3D, we would sometimes put our heads together to nail the formulas for effects such as Dopp...

Why does the function exist when there is already the perfectly good function ? Actually, you know the answer too, if you sit down and think about it. Winsock was originally developed to run on both 16-bit Windows and 32-bit Windows. Notice how the classic Winsock functions are based on window messages for asynchronous notifications. In the...