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One of my former managers told me this story from a project he worked on many years ago. This project was broken up into multiple groups, and there was a weekly meeting where representatives from each group got together to discuss how the project was going. One of the groups was responsible for generating the reports and analysis. This was an impo...

Back in the Windows 95 days, people swore that increasing the value of in the file fixed application errors. People usually made up some pseudo-scientific explanation for why this fixed crashes. These explanations were complete rot. These breakpoints had nothing to do with Windows applications. They were used by 32-bit device drivers to com...

At the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo which coincided with the operating system's launch, I paid a visit to the emulators.com booth, where they were excitedly showing off SoftMac 2000, a Mac emulator that ran on Windows 2000. Emulator trivia: MacOS booted in five seconds under Windows 2000, which was faster than the real Mac, ...

Oopsie.

In the month after DirectX 3 was released, "directx" became the number one most-searched-for term on microsoft.com. That in itself wasn't too surprising. What was more surprising was the word in sixth place: "sex". That puzzles me to this day. What kind of people search for "sex" on microsoft.com? And what were they expecting to find?

The people who work on the next generation of the window manager, known as the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), told me that their original plan was to get rid of the compatibility hack that says that invalidating the null window invalidates the entire desktop, but by an amazing coincidence, two days after I posted that article, they received a repo...

The release of Windows 2000 introduced a new setting: "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key," which defaults on for most Western languages. What's the story behind this setting? I still have the rationale from the user interface designer who introduced this feature. Here's a redacted copy: To support o...

Add this to your trivia pile. Keith Combs links to a pair of articles that that go into the history behind how Start Me Up become the theme for the Windows 95 launch. Part 1, Part 2.

An anonymous commenter asked why the function takes an parameter if the first thing it's going to do is convert the instance handle into a file name. Because that's not how it worked in 16-bit Windows. In 16-bit Windows there was no such thing as hook injection. All 16-bit Windows applications ran in the same address space, so there was no nee...

We saw last time how windows hooks were implemented in 16-bit Windows. Even though the was an opaque data type that should have been treated like a handle, many programs "knew enough to be dangerous" and took advantage of the fact that the was just a pointer to the previous hook procedure. The most common way of abusing this knowledge was by ...