The Old New Thing

History - The Old New Thing

Whimsical embarrassment as a gentle form of reprimand

December 7, 2005 Dec 7, 2005 12/7/05
Raymond Chen
A few months ago, I messed up a cross-component check-in and broke the build. I'm not proud of it. (In my excitement over finally having passed a few weeks' worth of testing requirements, I absently submitted only one of the components for check-in! My change was 99% within one component, and I forgot about the other 1%.) My submission cleared...

When a token changes its meaning mid-stream

December 6, 2005 Dec 6, 2005 12/6/05
Raymond Chen
The project leader for the initial version of Internet Explorer was well-known for wearing Hawaiian shirts. I'm told that the team managers decided to take one of those shirts and use it as an award to the team member who fixed the most bugs or some similar thing. What the team managers failed to take into account that nobody actually liked ...

Using floppy disks as semaphore tokens

December 5, 2005 Dec 5, 2005 12/5/05
Raymond Chen
In the very early days of Windows 95, the distribution servers were not particularly powerful. The load of having the entire team installing the most recent build when it came out put undue strain on the server. The solution (until better hardware could be obtained) was to have a stack of floppy disks in the office of the "build shepherd...

Why is a drive letter permitted in front of UNC paths (sometimes)?

November 22, 2005 Nov 22, 2005 11/22/05
Raymond Chen
A little-known quirk is that the file system accepts and ignores a drive letter in front of a UNC path. For example, if you have a directory called \\server\share\directory, you can say dir P:\\server\share\directory and the directory will be listed to the screen. The leading P: is ignored. Why is that? Rewind to 1984 and the upcoming ...

What’s the difference between HWND_TOP and HWND_TOPMOST?

November 21, 2005 Nov 21, 2005 11/21/05
Raymond Chen
The special values and have similar names but do completely different things when passed as the parameter to the function (or its moral equivalents such as ). As a backgrounder, you should start off by reading the MSDN discussion, which is perfectly accurate as far as it goes. Here, I'll discuss the issue from a historical perspective in ...

Force-feeding the dogfood

November 17, 2005 Nov 17, 2005 11/17/05
Raymond Chen
Windows 95 contained some new networking features, and since I was one of those crazy people who sampled every flavor of dogfood in the store, I actually tried out all of them. One of the features, a network protocol, I thought was interesting enough that I decided to help them out by forcing everybody else on the team to dogfood it. ...

Sampling every flavor of dogfood in the store

November 16, 2005 Nov 16, 2005 11/16/05
Raymond Chen
During the development of Windows 95, everybody was, of course, self-hosted and upgraded the operating system on a regular basis as new builds came out. I took it upon myself never to install the operating system twice the same way. Each time I ran setup, I would give different answers to the questions. Maybe this time, I'll leave out ...

When was the last time you formatted a floppy disk?

November 10, 2005 Nov 10, 2005 11/10/05
Raymond Chen
For some reason, I was reminded of the people who pooh-poohed Windows 95 because it didn't format floppy disks smoothly. Who spends all day formatting floppy disks? Even in 1995, when you bought a box of floppy disks, they came pre-formatted...

Why was GlobalWire called GlobalWire?

November 8, 2005 Nov 8, 2005 11/8/05
Raymond Chen
John Elliott wondered why the function was called . First, some background for those who never had to write 16-bit Windows programs. The function was similar to the 16-bit function, except that it had the bonus feature of relocating the memory to the lowest available linear address. You used this function as a courtesy if you intended to...