Showing tag results for History

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...

Georg Rottensteiner was curious about the weird things that WinG performed on installation to evaluate video cards. "What did it do actually and what for?" I don't actually know, since I was not involved in the WinG project, but I remember chatting with one of the developers who was working on video card benchmarks. He says that video card benc...

Gabe wanted to know the nature of the feedback that resulted in the change to Explorer navigation pane. Historically, Explorer had a navigation pane that contained a folder tree, and the navigation pane could be toggled on and off. From observations and usability studies, we observed that users in general found this toggling burdensome. People li...

Mike Dunn was curious about the intended purpose of . The style adds a row below the header control consisting of an edit control and a funnel icon. The funnel icon presumably represents a coffee filter, because after all, everybody in the world drinks coffee as much as people in Seattle. (Developers think they're so clever.) Mike points out t...

Miral wondered why the function draws at the default icon size instead of respecting the actual icon size. After all, if you loaded a nonstandard-sized icon via , then presumably you want to use that nonstandard size. The question is one of those types of questions that fails to understand history, like asking why NASA didn't send the space shut...