Showing tag results for History

Sep 11, 2014
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The history of Win32 critical sections so far

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The structure has gone through a lot of changes since its introduction back oh so many decades ago. The amazing thing is that as long as you stick to the documented API, your code is completely unaffected. Initially, the critical section object had an owner field to keep track of which thread entered the critical section, if any. It also had a ...

History
Aug 26, 2014
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It's time we face reality, my friends: We're not rocket scientists

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During the development of Windows 95, it was common for team members to pay visits to other teams to touch base and let them know what's been happening on the Windows 95 side of the project. It was during one of these informal visits that the one of my colleagues reported that he saw that one of the members of the partner team had a Ga...

History
Aug 19, 2014
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My friend and his buddy invented the online shopping cart back in 1994

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Back in 1994 or so, my friend helped out his buddy who worked as the IT department for a local Seattle company known as Sub Pop Records. Here's what their Web site looked like back then. Oh, and in case you were wondering, when I said that his buddy worked as the IT department, I mean that the IT department consisted of one guy, namely him. And t...

History
Jul 29, 2014
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Did the Windows 95 interface have a code name?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter kinokijuf wonders whether the Windows 95 interface had a code name. Nope. We called it "the new shell" while it was under preliminary development, and when it got enabled in the builds, we just called it "the shell." (Explorer originally was named Cabinet, unrelated to the container file format of the same name. This original name li...

History
Jul 21, 2014
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The alternate story of the time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a package delivery service

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Some people objected to the length, the structure, the metaphors, the speculation, and fabrication. So let's say they were my editors. Here's what the article might have looked like, had I taken their recommendations. (Some recommendations were to text that was also recommended cut. I applied the recommendations before cutting; the cuts are in g...

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Jul 18, 2014
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The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a package delivery service

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Back in the days of Windows 95 development, one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application for a major delivery service. This was a program that the company gave to its top-tier high-volume customers, so that they could place and track their orders directly. And by directly, I mean that the program dialed the modem (since that w...

History