{"id":7233,"date":"2012-07-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/07\/02\/tracking-shortcuts-and-the-early-history-of-multiple-monitors\/"},"modified":"2012-07-02T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T07:00:00","slug":"tracking-shortcuts-and-the-early-history-of-multiple-monitors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120702-00\/?p=7233","title":{"rendered":"Tracking shortcuts and the early history of multiple monitors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Roni <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10042729\"> put two suggestions in the suggestion box in the same entry<\/a>, which is a problem for me because I feel like I&#8217;m forced to answer both of them or neither.\n The first <strike>question<\/strike> suggestion has to do with how shortcuts can find their targets even if they&#8217;ve been renamed. This is something I had covered <a href=\"http:\/\/technet.microsoft.com\/en-us\/magazine\/2009.10.windowsconfidential.aspx\"> nearly a year before the question was asked<\/a>, so the reason I&#8217;m not answering that question isn&#8217;t that I&#8217;m ignoring the question. It&#8217;s that I already answered it.\n While I&#8217;m at it, here are other questions that I&#8217;ve already answered:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040349\">Did you notice that switching to\/from daylight saving time     changes the clock for all instances of Windows installed on     a computer<\/a>?&#8221;     Why,     <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/09\/02\/224672.aspx\">     yes I did<\/a>.     Six years previously. <\/li>\n<li>     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040351\">Why can&#8217;t you rename the Recycle Bin<\/a>?&#8221;     I answered that question two years earlier in a post with the devious title     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2008\/03\/17\/8080154.aspx\">Why can&#8217;t you rename the Recycle Bin<\/a>?&#8221; <\/li>\n<li>     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040583\">Why in Windows 95\/XP could you not drag and drop a file into a     running application on the taskbar<\/a>.&#8221;     Ah, six years earlier,     I posted an article with the provocative title     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/11\/24\/269237.aspx\">Why can&#8217;t you drop directly onto a taskbar button<\/a>?&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> The other question was a series of questions about the history of multiple monitor support in Windows.\n Actually, I think I&#8217;ve already discussed all of the parts of this <strike>question<\/strike> suggestion, so today&#8217;s entry is more like a <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/ClipShow\"> clip show<\/a>. &#8220;Remember the first time I talked about multiple monitors?&#8221;\n <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/07\/21\/189860.aspx\"> Windows&nbsp;98 was the first version of Windows to support multiple monitors<\/a>. (Code to support multiple monitors started being written shortly after Windows&nbsp;95 was out the door, so my guess is that the preliminary design work overlapped the end of the Windows&nbsp;95 project.) To facilitate development of code that takes advantage of multiple monitors, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2009\/12\/07\/9933241.aspx\"> the multimon.h header file<\/a> was introduced so you could code as if multiple monitor support was present in the operating system, and it would emulate the multimon APIs (with a single monitor) if running on Windows&nbsp;95.\n <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/07\/21\/189860.aspx\"> In Windows&nbsp;98, the maximum number of monitors was nine<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/02\/08\/9959494.aspx\"> There was no restriction on color depth<\/a> or resolution, because <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2011\/08\/01\/10191513.aspx\"> the most common configuration involved one powerful graphics card combined with one really lame one<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> When support for multiple monitors was ported to Windows&nbsp;NT, the Windows&nbsp;NT folks figured they could one-up the Windows&nbsp;98 team. Literally. The maximum number of monitors was increased from nine to ten. Who knows, maybe someday it will <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2008\/01\/22\/7191027.aspx\"> go to eleven<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Roni put two suggestions in the suggestion box in the same entry, which is a problem for me because I feel like I&#8217;m forced to answer both of them or neither. The first question suggestion has to do with how shortcuts can find their targets even if they&#8217;ve been renamed. This is something I [&hellip;]<\/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-7233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter Roni put two suggestions in the suggestion box in the same entry, which is a problem for me because I feel like I&#8217;m forced to answer both of them or neither. The first question suggestion has to do with how shortcuts can find their targets even if they&#8217;ve been renamed. This is something I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233","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=7233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233\/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=7233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}