Showing tag results for History

Dec 25, 2014
Post comments count0
Post likes count0

My pants are fancy!

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During the development of Windows, the User Research team tried out an early build of some proposed changes on volunteers from the general community. During one of the tests, they invited the volunteer to just play around with a particular component, to explore it the way they would at home. The usability subject scrolled around a bit, admired t...

History
Dec 19, 2014
Post comments count0
Post likes count0

How did protected-mode 16-bit Windows fix up jumps to functions that got discarded?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter Neil presumes that Windows 286 and later simply fixed up the movable entry table with jmp selector:offset instructions once and for all. It could have, but it went one step further. Recall that the point of the movable entry table is to provide a fixed location that always refers to a specific function, no matter where that function...

History
Nov 26, 2014
Post comments count0
Post likes count0

If 16-bit Windows had a single input queue, how did you debug applications on it?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

After learning about the bad things that happened if you synchronized your application's input queue with its debugger, commenter kme wonders how debugging worked in 16-bit Windows, since 16-bit Windows didn't have asynchronous input? In 16-bit Windows, all applications shared the same input queue, which means you were permanently in the situation...

History
Oct 30, 2014
Post comments count0
Post likes count1

Why is the FAT driver called FASTFAT? Why would anybody ever write SLOWFAT?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Anon is interested in why the FAT driver is called FASTFAT.SYS. "Was there an earlier slower FAT driver? What could you possibly get so wrong with a FAT implementation that it needed to be chucked out?" The old FAT driver probably had a boring name like, um, FAT.SYS. At some point, somebody decided to write a newer, faster one, so they called it ...

History