Showing tag results for History

A little while ago, we learned about the EBP chain. The EBP chain in 32-bit code is pretty straightforward because there is only one type of function call. But in 16-bit code there are two types of function calls, the near call and the far call. A near call pushes a 16-bit return address on the stack before branching to the function entry point, ...

Some times ago, I described why a corrupted binary sometimes results in the error "Program too big to fit in memory". Commenter Neil was under the impression that nonrelocatable programs files could be larger than 64KB and used the DEBUG command to verify this assertion. While it's true that DEBUG can load files bigger than 64KB, that doesn't me...

Code names are rampant at Microsoft. One of the purposes of a code name is to impress upon the people who work with the project that the name is only temporary, and that the final name will come from the marketing folks (who sometimes pull through with a catchy name like Zune, and who sometimes drop the ball with a dud like Bob and who sometimes co...

In 2008, the first I'm a PC ad aired, opening with Sean Siler doing an impression of John Hodgman portraying a PC, and continuing with montage of people proudly announcing, "I'm a PC!" Accompanying the first four people to appear on screen are email addresses. The addresses are live (or at least they were when the campaign launched), and if you ...

Understanding decisions in the context of history.

While cleaning up my office, I ran across some old documents which reminded me that there are a lot of weird NOP instructions in Windows 95. Certain early versions of the 80386 processor (manufactured prior to 1987) are known as B1 stepping chips. These early versions of the 80386 had some obscure bugs that affected Windows. For example, if...

Ane asks why, if you have a string with an illegal filename character on the clipboard, and you paste that string into a rename edit box, do the illegal characters get deleted not just from the edit box but also the clipboard? Basically, it's a bug, the result of a poor choice of default in an internal helper class. There is an internal helper c...

Commenter S asks, "What happened to the return code from WinMain in a Windows 3.1 app?" After all, there was no function in 16-bit Windows. Basically, the exit code vanished into the ether. Unless you captured it. The Toolhelp library provided a low-level hook into various parts of the kernel, allowing you to monitor, among other things, the cr...

KJK::Hyperion asks, "Could you shed some light on Get/SetMessageExtraInfo? It's almost like nobody on earth used them, ever, and I can't get some sample code." Yup, that's about right. Nobody on earth (to within experimental error) ever used them. These functions were introduced on July 20, 1990 (I'm looking at the change history right now) at th...

(Windows was released on November 20, 1985, twenty-five years ago tomorrow. Happy birthday!) You have and you have . Why do we need both? They're both read-only directories. They are both searched by . They seem to be redundant. (There are other directories like which are not relevant to the discussion.) Back in the old days, the distinction wa...