Showing tag results for History

During the development of Windows 95, the user interface team discovered that a component provided by another team didn't work well under multi-threaded conditions. It was documented that the function had to be the first call made by a thread into the component. The user interface team discovered that if one thread called , and then used the...

Most people know that Windows 95 was code-named Chicago. The subprojects of Windows 95 also had their code names, in part because code names are cool, and in part because these projects were already under way by the time somebody decided to combine them into one giant project. Even when they were separate projects, the first three teams...

Gabe wondered when the message was introduced. The message was introduced by Win32. It did not exist in 16-bit Windows. But it was there all along. The The message was carefully designed so that it worked in 16-bit Windows automatically. In other words, you retained your source code compatibility between 16-bit and 32-bit Windows without hav...

Once upon a time, there was a team developing two versions of a product, the first a short-term project to ship soon, and the other a more ambitious project to ship later. (Sound familiar?) They chose to assign the projects code names Ren and Stimpy, in honor of the lead characters from the eponymous cartoon series. Over time, the two projects me...

When you call , the common file save dialog will ask the user to choose a file name, and just before it returns it does a little create/delete dance where it creates the file the user entered, and then deletes it. What's up with that? This is a leftover from the ancient days of 16-bit Windows 3.1, back when file systems were real file systems...

There is an oft-abused program named . Why does its name end in ? Why not just call it ? (I will for the moment ignore the rude behavior of calling people stupid under the guise of asking a question.) Because there needed to be a way to distinguish the 16-bit version from the 32-bit version. Windows 95 had both (the 16-bit version) and (...

During the discussion of how real-mode Windows handled return addresses into discarded segments, Gabe wondered, "What happens when somebody does a into a discardable segment?" I'm going to assume that everybody knows how traditionally works so I can go straight to the analysis. The reason is tricky is that it has to jump to a return address...

Today is New Year's Eve, another opportunity for to mark that an approximately-integral number of revolutions of the earth have occurred since some point in time that wasn't even calculated correctly in the first place. (We retain it for backward compatibility.) December 31, 1999 was a particularly anxious day in the technology sector. Microsoft's...

Blinky blinky.

Some people suggest that one thing Microsoft Research could do with that time machine they're working on is to go back in time and change the name of the Program Files directory to simply Programs. No, it really should be Program Files. Program Files are not the same as Programs. Programs are things like Calc, Notepad, Excel, Photoshop. They ar...