Showing tag results for History

Sep 21, 2010
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Fact check: The first major Microsoft product launched via Webcast

Raymond Chen

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...

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Sep 13, 2010
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Why doesn't Win32 give you the option of ignoring failures in DLL import resolution?

Raymond Chen

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 ...

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Sep 1, 2010
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Yes, the Windows 7 beta wallpaper was a picture of a betta fish

Raymond Chen

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...

History
Aug 24, 2010
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Windows 95: It sucks less

Raymond Chen

An unofficial team motto.

History
Aug 20, 2010
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Why does the primary monitor have (0,0) as its upper left coordinate?

Raymond Chen

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....

History
Aug 16, 2010
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What happened to WinHelp?

Raymond Chen

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...

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Jul 27, 2010
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Hardware backward compatibility: The finicky floppy drive

Raymond Chen

I think the behavior is more petulant than finicky, but finicky is alliterative. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was talking with the person responsible for, among other things, the floppy disk driver, and I learned about a particular driver hack that was needed to work around a flaw in a very common motherboard chipset. Apparently the flo...

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Jul 6, 2010
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Hardware backward compatibility: The firmware that missed one tiny detail

Raymond Chen

The person responsible for the floppy disk driver in Windows 95 also was responsible for the low-level CD-ROM drivers. (Not to be confused with the CDFS file system, which was handled by the file system team, not the hardware driver folks.) And I remember a story about one particularly strange CD-ROM drive. This drive was produced by a name-b...

History