Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow Windows 95 will soon turn 30. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen recalled that when testing Microsoft's reimagining of Windows, an overflow was discovered that had nothing to do with the operating system itself. According to Chen, the problem happened when an enterprising Microsoft manager acquired as many different applications …
Yeah, it's an oddity alright and now a good one. Being able to patch things is really useful, unfortunately humans having a tendency to being lazy and bean-counters being what they are, we moved away from trying our best to make sure that something worked when delivered, to just chucking stuff out and assuming that it may or may not work, it can be patched later anyway.
Being able to patch software relatively easy is a good thing, undoubtedly, but it's also a double edged sword. I think that when they could only update software by sending out new discs (be they CD or floppy), companies did seem to try that bit harder to get things right.
Now, because they have tools that can update software automiatically within a few hours, and with little cost, it seems that they rush things to market a little too quickly.
It's not unheard of even with physical copies of software to have to download tens of gigabytes in patches.
It's the same in the console space. I've heard there are a few games on the PS5 and Xbox where all that is on the disk is a downloader application. I've also heard that the on the Switch 2, some of the game cards don't even have that. They just have some of code that when the Switch reads it, it just downloads that game..
It's meant to be down to the developer (e.g. all first-party games seem to be on regular cartridges, and I think Cyberpunk is on a cartridge as well), but the other rumour is that Nintendo are only selling 64GB cartridges, when even 32GB was rarely used on Switch 1, which naturally pushes most developers to use the key cards instead, at the lower price, as I'm sure Nintendo is taking a nice chunk of money for the cartridges.
Mainly because few people were on line then and had to be shipped the patches on physical media. Nowadays, with almost everyone online, they can just ship any old crap and then send out updates every month until it either works or is sun-setted for the new version, the latter being the more likely outcome.
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.
I well remember the days of yore when s/w was written almost entirely for the US market and database managers often had special field entries for phone nos. and "zip" codes, formatted and error checked for the US systems and therefore useless everywhere else in the world :-) Easily worked around of course by simply creating the relevant localised fields, but more irritating than the still current default of highlighting "United States" or "English (US)" as the default or at the top of an otherwise alphabetical list. But less irritating than s/w programmes/drivers defaulting o US Letter size when there is only a single country in the entire world that thinks that's a good idea (and IIRC, didn't US.gov standardise on A4 too some years ago? Or has Trump signed an EO forcing a switch back to the clearly more patriotic "US Letter" and not that commie/socialist A4 size?)
I know banks are required to report any cash withdrawal of 10K or more. Maybe there was some sort of requirement back then that the store would have to report 10K purchases and an easy way to prohibit would be fail to do the transaction. 10K was much more valuable in 95 than now. In 95 I think you could still buy a car(an inexpensive one) for less and today I'm not sure you can buy a golf cart in the US for 10k now.
An engineer might, but the article states that a manager went...!
Having said that, with it being a round number I wouldn't be surprised if it only went up to 9999.99 before not having the digits to display anything else, so stopped working in some way or another.
I'm reasonably sure a Micro$oft 'engineer' would not know the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground.
You're talking about the idiots who wrote that BSOD known as Windoze 95. Oh hey, those are the idiots who made the term "BSOD" known worldwide!
I remember in the early 80's working on registers from Data Terminal Systems that would lockup a on sale over $32,256.00
$32,767 seems like a more obvious failure point, although I suppose it depends on how it was encoding the cents fraction! Might you have misremembered? I know I struggle to remember things from last month, let alone the 80s. Which were 20 years ago now (shutupshutupshutup...)
Or a limit outside the immediate capacity of data storage and as another vulture noted, quite likely a limit of 9,999.99 due to display issues. It could even be that BCD was being used because that's really easy for output and maths and if only 6 BCD digits were available for some arcane reason (possibly to prevent an integer overflow when worrying about binary) then that would also limit it to 9,999.99.
"quite likely a limit of 9,999.99 due to display issues."
The BCD limit is entirely plausible, but I'd put my money on the cash register display. 30 years ago, they were still mostly vacuum fluorescent or LED digits and a 6 digit display is sounds entirely reasonable for most places where the maximum expected purchase would likely not exceed anything close to $10,000 and such items are built to a price. We had a similar issue here in the UK a few years ago with petrol pumps and the large price display adverts when the fuel prices went up to more than the display could handle (ie it went above £2 per litre and most displays were 199.99p capable only, ie the first digit only had a the 2 segments for a "1", not the full 7 segments - I saw places with a "2" pasted over the first digit)
My recollection (as a non-driver, btw) was that it was when the price of petrol went above one pound per gallon that it started being quoted by the litre instead. NB the British gallon is 4.546 litres, whereas the yankie one is a mere 3.785 litres, whilst petrol(eum) is a liquid, not a gas.
Let's also not forget that gas is short for gasoline (or sometimes gasolene early on), which apparently originated in the Britiah Isles in the 1860s, where it was a trademarked term.
The French word pétrol (sans the accent) was stolen for unknown reasons[0] by the British in the early 1890s.
So as usual, the Americans are using the original English word, and the Brits are using a bastardized French word ... and in their ignorance, deriding the Yanks for using improper English.
[0] Possibly by the working class, to give themselves airs.
> gas is short for gasoline
Note that before cars, gasoline was nasty stuff nobody wanted. The best use was to vaporize it to a GAS. We call it Coleman Stove for camping, but there were also lanterns burning gasoline vapor in a mantle for a bright white light, better than candles or kerosene on a wick. Even in cars we maintain the fiction that the fuel is "vaporized" i.e. a gas in the intake tract, though it isn't and the engine might not like that (vapor lock is bad, but also nearly obsolete).
In a POS from that era you can expect pocket calculator functionality and little else usually. Some of these machines had all the same quirks as a cheap calculator too, including lost bits in certain calculations or even outright errors.
This is partly why quite a few specialized retailers used DOS/etc. machines instead of in addition, esp. radio shack, various car parts and construction dealers. That and the ability to have a proper invoice.
Yes. Good old eight bit machines, all of them even in the early 2000s. If you had programmed just one of them -some odd student's jobs for the tedious and technically skilled came from that- you'd never have to look up an ASCII table in your life. Burned into your grey matter EPROM for ever.
I'm guessing the writer hasn't watched an episode of Extreme Couponing before. The stack overload errors in old retail systems is quite often used as a dramatic point of tension in many an episode (alongside a coupon that won't scan correctly).
Often at one of the Piggly Wiggly stores in the mid-west, where a borderline prepper manages to buy 50 cases of white Gatorade for a mere $0.04
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