Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 27,225 visits in April 2023 from 18,526 unique visitors.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from March. Faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely, as is the banner page, since none of these are meant to be seen independently of a document page.
Two pages this month suggest another revival of interest in the so-called AARD code. In 1992 I was the first outside Microsoft to have found the code and explained its operation. I believe that even the programmers at DR DOS, which is widely accepted to have been the target, did not understand this code this early. No DR DOS that escapes the code’s tests is known until 1993, no matter that some DR DOS enthusiast has written differently for Wikipedia. I revisited the topic in late 2021 while diverted to retro-computing. As with much that I do, but especially on topics that I’m conflicted about, I never finished even half of what I thought I might write. Show me a continued interest in what I’ve written so far, and I may yet make time to finish what I started among my pandemic diversions.
Especially pleasing this month is the first appearance in these lists of another page that came out of my dversion into retro-computing. In my head, this long page was partly a recreational demonstration to motivate budding reverse engineers, and partly to make some points about how things come to be known about the history of Windows and yet be not known not quite accurately.
Sneaking in is another page from a whole area of Windows, i.e., its shell, that I once believed had great potential for extending what use might be developed by non-Microsoft programmers to give Windows users some imaginative or powerful utility. I gave it up much more than a decade ago because I couldn’t drive myself into the ground in a search for innovation that nobody seemed to agree with me about. Now I get emails about it. Now a long-abandoned page that is anyway just a catalogue gets 102 views in a month. What is going on?