{"id":33353,"date":"2005-11-14T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-14T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/11\/14\/what-was-dr-watsons-original-name\/"},"modified":"2005-11-14T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-11-14T15:00:00","slug":"what-was-dr-watsons-original-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20051114-00\/?p=33353","title":{"rendered":"What was Dr. Watson’s original name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nWhat most people probably don’t know is that\n\nDr. Watson’s name<\/A>\nwasn’t originally “Dr. Watson”.\n<\/P>\n

\nThe original name of the diagnostic tool was “Sherlock”,\nwhose icon was a lit drop-stem pipe.\nI remember chatting about the Doctor with its author,\n\nthe late Don Corbitt<\/A>, whose office was just a few doors down from mine.\nIn 1991, he had to change the name from “Sherlock” to “Dr. Watson”;\nI had forgotten why, but\n\nDanny Glasser<\/a> came to my rescue\nand reminded me that there was already a debugging tool called\n“Sherlock” that had come out a few years previously.\nThe name had to change,\nand the Doctor stepped in to fill Sherlock’s shoes.\nThe icon was originally a doctor’s bag, but it changed to the\nstethoscope-wielding general practitioner a few months later.\n<\/P>\n

\nYou should also check out\n\nMatt Pietrek’s reminiscences about Dr. Watson<\/A>.\n<\/P>\n

\nA note about Don Corbitt.\nHe was a tall fellow with a deep booming voice,\nbut he never used it.\nInstead, he spoke in a gentle, reassuring tone,\nbacking it up with code that was always solid.\nI consider it an honor to have worked with him.\nTaking up the mantle of keeping the Doctor up to date with the\nlatest forensic techniques,\nI updated it (i.e., rewrote it from scratch) for\nWindows 98.\nI was not a member of the Windows 98 team but wrote\nthe program as a favor to them at great personal cost.\n(My then-boss didn’t approve of my little side project\nand made his displeasure known at my next performance review.)\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sherlock.<\/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-33353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Sherlock.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33353","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=33353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33353\/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=33353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}