Showing tag results for History

Commenter Dean Earley asks, "Why is there a 'current directory' AND an current drive? Why not merge them?" Pithy answer: Originally, each drive had its own current directory, but now they don't, but it looks like they do. Okay, let's unwrap that sentence. You actually know enough to answer the question yourself; you just have to put the pieces...

In Windows 95, the most heavily-tested computer game was DOOM. Not because the testers spent a lot of time developing test plans and test harnesses and automated run-throughs. Nope, it was because it was by far the most popular game the Windows 95 team members played to unwind. It was a huge breakthrough when DOOM finally ran inside a MS...

In 2009, while hosting the Webcast launch of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (what a mouthful; no wonder they renamed it Lync), Stephen Elop claimed that this was the first time Microsoft had launched a major product via Webcast. Elop's crack team of marketing researchers apparently forgot about the Webcast launch, just three months earlie...

Yuhong Bao asked, via the Suggestion Box, "Why not implement delay-loading by having a flag in the import entry specifying that Windows should mimic the Windows 3.1 behavior for resolving that import?" Okay, first we have to clear up the false assumptions in the question. The question assumes that Windows 3.1 had delay-loading functionality ...

Maybe somebody took a picture.c

It wasn't long before people realized that the fish in the default wallpaper for the Windows 7 beta was a betta fish. This was intended to be a cute little pun, though some people took the semiotics to an extreme, Dude, this is Windows, not The Da Vinci Code. It's not like the people who chose the wallpaper are using a backchannel to pass se...

An unofficial team motto.

By definition, the primary monitor is the monitor that has (0,0) as its upper left corner. Why can't the primary monitor be positioned somewhere else? Well, sure you could do that, but then you'd have to invent a new name for the monitor whose upper left corner is at (0,0), and then you're back where you started. In other words, it's just a name....

Commenter winhelp (probably not his/her real name) wonders what happened to WinHelp.exe. I don't know, but it turns out the answer was already known to the Internet. At the time the question was posted, the answer was already in the Wikipedia entry for Windows Help—it even had a citation! The question does highlight another one of those n...

The story We Burned the Poop reminded me of an embarrassing story a colleague of mine related from earlier in his programming career. During the development of the product he was working on, the programmers needed an image for a comparatively rarely-used piece of the user interface. Since programmers aren't graphic designers, they inserted a plac...