The Old New Thing

History - The Old New Thing

But I have Visual Basic Professional

September 30, 2005 Sep 30, 2005 09/30/05
Raymond Chen
Back in 1995, I was participating in a chat room on MSN on the subject of device driver development. One of the people in the chat room asked, "Can I write a device driver in Visual Basic?" I replied, "Windows 95 device drivers are typically written in low-level languages such as C or even assembly language." Undaunted, the person ...

Kurt would have wanted it that way

September 26, 2005 Sep 26, 2005 09/26/05
Raymond Chen
Several years ago, I had the pleasure of working in the office next to Danny, a phenomenally talented fellow, not just a stellar programmer but also an accomplished pianist, singer, video game restorer, and skier. I remember when he was working on DirectSound3D, we would sometimes put our heads together to nail the formulas for effects such as...

Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

September 8, 2005 Sep 8, 2005 09/8/05
Raymond Chen
Why does the function exist when there is already the perfectly good function ? Actually, you know the answer too, if you sit down and think about it. Winsock was originally developed to run on both 16-bit Windows and 32-bit Windows. Notice how the classic Winsock functions are based on window messages for asynchronous notifications. ...

Windows 95 crashes a cash register

August 25, 2005 Aug 25, 2005 08/25/05
Raymond Chen
Not everything related to the Windows 95 launch went well. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a local CompUSA store found that their cash registers crashed at midnight, forcing eager customers to wait ninety minutes before the problem could be resolved. The cause: A bug in the cash register software which had lain undiscovered because ...

A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

August 24, 2005 Aug 24, 2005 08/24/05
Raymond Chen
A limited number of seats at the Windows 95 launch were available to the product team, so there was a lottery to see who would get one of those tickets. The remainder of the team would be standing on bleachers hidden behind the stage, to be unveiled at the grand climax of the product launch festivities. I happened to have been a winner ...

Buying an entire Egghead Software store

August 24, 2005 Aug 24, 2005 08/24/05
Raymond Chen
During the development of Windows 95 (which released to the public ten years ago today), application compatibility was of course a very high priority. To make sure that coverage was as broad as possible, the development manager for Windows 95 took his pick-up truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead ...

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
Thirteen. In case you were wondering. And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. (I...