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My favorite bad CD-ROM drive from Windows 95 was one where the manufacturer cut a corner to save probably twenty-five cents. The specification for CD-ROM controllers indicates that each can host up to four CD-ROM drives. When you talk to the card, you specify which drive you wish to communicate with. The manufacturer of a certain brand of contr...

When you are attempting to architect an operating system, backwards compatibility is one of the ones you just have to accept. But when new programs rely on app hacks designed for old programs, that makes you want to scream.

I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn't analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock. Yet there is is in the Longhorn sidebar. What g...

During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their company name in our INF files in a manner that made their company name similar to an insulting word. ...

Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend in most of North America and Europe, so it seems a good time to discuss the whole problem of Daylight Savings Time and timestamps.

Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation went something like this:    the ".asm" extension on "foo" is...

What determines the order in which icons appear in the Alt+Tab list? The icons appear in the same order as the window Z-order. When you switch to a window, then it comes to the top of the Z-order. If you minimize a window, it goes to the bottom of the Z-order. The Alt+Esc hotkey (gosh, does anybody s...

It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard template...

More strange function names.

If such a notification were generated, ill-behaved programs would just react to a click on the balloon's "X" button with an annoying follow-up dialog like, "Are you sure you want to ignore my wonderful message?" So there was a conscious decision not to give them the chance. In the Before Time...