Showing tag results for History

Starting in Windows 2000 and continuing through Windows Vista, you could drag a folder out of Explorer and slam it into the edge of the screen. When you let go, it docked itself to that edge of the screen like a toolbar. A customer noticed that this stopped working in Windows 7 and asked, "Was this feature dropped in Windows 7, ...

Commenter HiTechHiTouch wants to know whether the "X-Mouse" feature went through the "every request starts at −100 points filter", and if so, how did it manage to gain 99 points? The X-Mouse feature is ancient and long predates the "−100 points" rule. It was added back in the days when a developer could add a random rogue feature bec...

Anon wants to know why I am listed in the credits for the video game Quake under the "Special Thanks" section. "Were you an early tester/debugger?" I've never played a game of Quake in my entire life. I (and most of the rest of the Windows 95 team) played DOOM, but after a while, first-person-shooter games started giving me a headache. By ...

I noted some time ago that real-mode Windows had to do all its memory management without any hardware assistance. And yet, along the way, they managed to implement an LRU-based discard algorithm. Gabe is really interested in how that was done. As we saw a few months ago, inter-segment calls were redirected through a little stub which either ju...

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...