{"id":103327,"date":"2020-01-14T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-14T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103327"},"modified":"2020-01-14T06:41:18","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T14:41:18","slug":"20200114-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20200114-00\/?p=103327","title":{"rendered":"The historical significance of the Burgermaster drive-in restaurant"},"content":{"rendered":"

From 1981 to 1986, Microsoft was headquartered at what was then known as the Northup Building, 10700 Northup Way in Bellevue. A long time ago, I told a story about the La Quinta Inn next to that building<\/a>. The building on the other side also plays a significant role in the history of Microsoft. That building is the Burgermaster restaurant.<\/p>\n

In Windows 3.0, the data segment that recorded the locations of all the other data segments was named the BurgerMaster.\u00b9 Why?<\/p>\n

According to one story, the developer couldn’t think of a good name, so he looked out his window, saw the big sign that said BURGERMASTER<\/i>, and decided to name it BurgerMaster<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Although the capitalization of the restaurant name is Burgermaster<\/i>, the sign is printed in all-caps, and the developer erroneously capitalized it as BurgerMaster<\/i> with a capital M<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Another story is that the segment is named BurgerMaster<\/i> because it is the most important segment in Windows, just like how the Burgermaster restaurant is the most important restaurant for Windows developers.<\/p>\n

The Burgermaster restaurant was so important that Bill Gates’s secretary kept it on speed dial<\/a>. In fact, it wasn’t just on speed dial for Bill Gates’s secretary. It was a company-wide<\/i> speed dial number. You could call them to order a burger, walk next door, and your order would be ready and waiting for you. This was a novelty back in the 1980s, though nowadays it sounds so old-fashioned to phone in a take-out order instead of using an app.<\/p>\n

\u00b9 At some point, it was given a much less whimsical name: The global master handle<\/i>. But the comments in the code still call it the BurgerMaster.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can just phone it in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-103327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

You can just phone it in.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}