Showing tag results for History

Leo Davidson observes that a hit-test code is defined for , but it is not documented, and wonders what's up. The is another one of those features that never got implemented. The code does nothing and nobody uses it. It was added back in Windows 95 for reasons lost to the mists of time, but when the reason for adding it vanished (maybe a ...

In the history of the Internet, there have been many cases of one company providing a service, and others trying to piggyback off the service through a nonstandard client. The result is usually a back-and-forth where the provider changes the interface, the piggybacker reverse-engineers the interface, back and forth, until one side finally g...

Commenter Roni put two suggestions in the suggestion box in the same entry, which is a problem for me because I feel like I'm forced to answer both of them or neither. The first question suggestion has to do with how shortcuts can find their targets even if they've been renamed. This is something I had covered nearly a year before the question w...

Last week, I described how real-mode Windows fixed up jumps to functions that got discarded. But what about return addresses to functions that got discarded? The naïve solution would be to allocate a special "return address recovery" function for each return address you found, but that idea comes with its own problems: You are patching addresses...

In a discussion of how real-mode Windows walked stacks, commenter Matt wonders about fixing jumps in the rest of the code to the discarded functions. I noted in the original article that "there are multiple parts to the solution" and that stack-walking was just one piece. Today, we'll look at another piece: Inter-segment fixups. Recall that ...

An anonymous commenter was curious about how the function arrived at its strange name, what the purpose of the third parameter is, and why it is inconsistent between Windows 95 and Windows NT. The sense of word "random" here is hacker slang rather than its formal probabilistic definition, specifically sense 2: "Assorted, undistin...

Chris wants to know how the close button ended up to the right of the minimize and maximize/restore buttons. "In OS/2, it is on the left, which left the two other buttons in place." I don't know why the Close button went to the upper right instead of going to the left of the other buttons, but I'm going to guess. (That's what I do around here mos...

Commenter Niels wonders when and how the registry was introduced to 16-bit Windows and how much of it carried over to Windows 95. The 16-bit registry was extremely simple. There were just keys, no values. The only hive was . All it was used for was COM objects and file associations. The registry was stored in the file, and its maximum siz...

Commenter rs asks, "Why does Windows (historically) return 2 for while Wine returns zero?" The function multiplies the first two parameters and divides by the third. Therefore, the mathematically correct answer for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) is 1, because a × b ÷ b = a for all nonzero b. So both...

Mike wondered why the system notification icons went colorless in Windows 7 and why they went back to regular tooltips instead of the custom tooltips. I don't know either, so I asked Larry Osterman, who was in charge of the Volume icon. And he didn't know either. He was merely given new icons by the design team. But that doesn't stop me f...