Showing tag results for History

His friends call him Bill.

I've received independent confirmations as to the authorship of Notepad, so I'm inclined to believe it. Sorry you didn't get to go to the award ceremony. The original author of Notepad also served as the development manager for Windows 95. His job was to herd the cats that made up the programmers who worked on Windows 95, a job which yo...

Commenter charless asks why shlwapi.dll imports a nonexistent function from mpr.dll, which shows up in dependency tools as a broken import. Because that function did exist at one point, although it doesn't exist any more. The function in question was available only on Windows 95-series versions of Windows. It never existed on Windows N...

James MAstros asked why it's possible to create a PIF file that refers to a program that isn't an MS-DOS program. (That's only part of the question; I addressed other parts last year.) Well, for one thing, there was indeed code to prevent you from setting PIF properties for something that isn't an MS-DOS program, so the precaution was already th...

Exposure.

Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool. We didn't find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, "Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with t...

It tries to be DOS date/time format but misses.

When you view your pictures with the Photo Gallery program which comes with Windows Vista, and which is also available for download from live.com, you might see a colored tinge. Where is the tinge coming from, and how do you get rid of it? Ironically, what you're actually seeing is the absence of a tinge, but you got so used to seeing the tinge, ...

A few years ago, Larry Osterman explained the famous beeping death. Windows 95 had its own noise-related death, what nobody has called ticking death, but that's what I'm going to call it. (Let's see how long before somebody decide to add it to Wikipedia.) When your machine fell into ticking death, each time you moved the mouse or pressed a ...

Sad but true: Once you document a file format, it becomes a de facto API. The Windows 95 team learned this the hard way when they set out to replace Program Manager with Explorer. Not only were the settings in the file documented, so too was the binary file format of files. The binary file format was included for diagnostic purposes: If you...