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Jon DeVaan's avatar

Here is a piece of Windows trivia related to that old Microsoft building. In Windows 2.0, if one wanted to dereference a global handle (an opaque data type), one would search for the memory block named "Burgermaster" in the debugger. Then use the handle as an offset inside the memory block to find the physical pointer to the the memory referenced by the handle. People outside the company would ask why that was the name of the global handle table. It literally was on the sign the programmer saw when looking out their office window.

Burgermaster is still there. Microsoft is not.

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Brad Weed's avatar

VB was a lifesaver for me. I prototyped the Word and PPT ruler in VB and sent the .exe to the dev to play with. He called me and asked that I come to his office. He said, "Designers only send me .bmp's...we need to talk." He had some cool ideas he wanted me to prototype (like holding the alt-key while dragging the arrows to reveal dimensions) and he knew I could do it faster than he could. BTW...My design mimic'ed the physical tab-stops on a typewriter. Don Norman praised them as an example of leveraging real world affordances in the digital world. Not so true any more. But in 1992, Microsoft receptionists still had IBM Selectric's sitting next to them! 😮

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