A story in honor of Katie Couric's final day at the Today show. Last month I happened to run into a former member of the shell team who worked on the Windows XP Welcome screen. He told me a story from CES 2001, where Windows XP's interface (code-named Luna) was unveiled. There was going to be a segment on the Today show, and the We...
In former times very cross-platform NTVDM was. If you view in a hex editor, you'll find the message "Using Yoda on an x86 may be hazardous to your systems' health" buried inside it. Yoda was the name of the internal debugger that was used to debug the MS-DOS emulator, also known as the Virtual DOS Machine or VDM. (Buried inside the Yoda source c...
As we saw earlier, in 16-bit Windows, the identified a program. The Win32 kernel is a complete redesign from the 16-bit kernel, introducing such concepts as "kernel objects" and "security descriptors". In particular 16-bit Windows didn't have "process IDs"; the instance handle served that purpose. That is why the and functions returned an . But...
After I mentioned that house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus, I received an e-mail message from Mike Daly which corrects some of my mistakes and provides additional details: Actually, there were two houses in the strip in front of RedWest. The one you show has not been moved. The other ended up on blocks and parked opposite the RedWest d...
I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, "Hey, is anybody using start.com?" I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to "synergize" with the "Start Me Up" campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting ...
It was already taken, but that's okay.
(This is the first in a series of short posts on where Microsoft products got their names.) The original name for the malware protection service was "mpsvc" the "Microsoft Protection Service", but it was discovered later that that filename was already used by malware! As a result, the name of the service had to be changed by sticking an "ms" in f...
What's the deal with the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus? Here is my understanding. It may be incomplete or even flat-out wrong. The house belongs to a couple who was unwilling to sell their property when Microsoft's real estate people were buying up the land on which to build the RedWest campus. (I'm told it was originally a chick...
Another use of decoys.
You may have noticed that there's a copy of Notepad in and another in . Why two? Compatibility, of course. Windows 3.0 put Notepad in the Windows directory. Windows NT put it in the System32 directory. Notepad is perhaps the most commonly hardcoded program in Windows. many Setup programs use it to view the Readme file, and you can use...
