Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow
- Reference: 1749976269
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/15/windows_95_testing_almost_stalled/
- Source link:
According to Chen, the problem happened when an enterprising Microsoft manager acquired as many different applications as possible to try out on the operating system.
Microsoft was keen that the rollout of the new product went off without a hitch, so a huge emphasis was placed on compatibility. To that end, the development manager took his truck to a local store and bought one copy of every PC program in stock. The resultant stack of boxes was dumped on the tables in Microsoft's cafeteria, and the Windows 95 team was encouraged to help themselves.
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The catch? Taking one or two programs meant that the engineers concerned had to take responsibility for testing them against Windows 95. They had to log any problems, and surrender the application for further investigation if asked.
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Engineers also got to keep the software once Windows 95 shipped. "If you did a good job with your two," Chen [4]recalled some years ago , "You could come back for more."
An interesting approach to checking compatibility, and quite different from the Windows Insider program of today.
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However, there was an unexpected consequence of picking up so much software that could be described as an overflow, or perhaps an example of ill-thought-through character limits. Not in Windows 95, we hasten to add, but in the cash register at the store that the Microsoft manager visited.
"The store's cash register crashed whenever the total exceeded $10,000," [6]said Chen, suggesting that, as well as testing Windows 95, Operation "Buy All The Things" also tested the retail system and found it wanting.
[7]Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple
[8]The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2
[9]The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit
[10]Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?
While the total might seem almost like a rounding error to today's users pondering their Azure subscriptions or Mac Pro purchases in the Apple Store, it was a big deal in the 1990s. "Who would buy $10,000 of stuff by just walking into a store? If you’re going to buy that much stuff, you would use a purchase order, right?" said Chen.
The solution was one familiar to many programmers. Break the total into chunks that do not exceed the $10,000 limit.
So, the testing happened, and the rest is history.
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However, it is amusing to think that Windows 95 was almost undone by some programmer not anticipating how big certain numbers might get in an entirely separate system. Windows 95 had many issues, but sticking a number bigger than 10,000 into its calculator was not one. ®
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[4] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34463
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[6] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250610-00/?p=111260
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/21/chen_windows_cpu_speed/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/raymond_chen_usb/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/08/moricons_dll_raymond_chen/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/17/windows_95_windows_three_point_one/
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[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"Microsoft was keen that the rollout of the new product went off without a hitch"
Oh those were the days.
When people cared about getting it right *before* shipping it
I'm sure there was a good reason (it was the early 90s, probably hardware), but limits like this often seem really arbitrary to me. They often seem to arise because someone wants to 'be right' more than anything technical.
I have had arguments with people in my career about the length of an email field, because 'who would have one longer than 30 chars'?
I was (what I thought was logically) pointing to the SMTP specs and arguing that we should at least pick a value longer than the max domain name length.
I lost, because winning was more important that accepting that the arbitrary number was wrong and there's only so long you can argue in the face of that logic.
(I don't work there any more.... no-one does).
The worst I ever say was really short lengths in the postal address fields. The users were just wrapping one address line into the next - it was all they could do. I think it was because the program was Cobollox with a lot of thinking held over from the days of tape. They had a fixed record length and it was applied to everything. Only N characters available for addresses. Allow for 4 lines and N/4 is what you get. 16 characters (or whatever it was) should be enough for anyone.
Quality control
Nowadays, judging from results, it would appear that staff are forbidden from testing any software for compatibility, especially WIndows 11 itself.