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The numerology of the sample directory listing in the Windows 95 font selector property sheet page


In Windows 95, it became tradition that if you
modified the code that displays the font preview
in the Windows 95 command prompt font chooser
property sheet page,
you also got to tweak the sample date and file sizes
to be a value personally significant to you.






By the time Windows 95 shipped, the values in the font
preview were as follows:



C:WINDOWS> dir
Directory of C:WINDOWS
SYSTEM 03-01-95
WIN COM 22,867 03-01-95
WIN INI 11,728 03-01-95
WELCOME EXE 19,539 03-01-95


I don't see the significance to these values,
but maybe you can try to find something.
Unfortunately, I don't know who the last person was
to modify the dialog template, so I can't ask them.



Bonus chatter:
When I told this story to one of my colleagues,
I received a story in exchange:
When this dialog was ported to Windows NT,
the developer who did this slipped his name
as the last "file" of the the directory listing,
which was visible only when you picked the smallest
font size.
It was discovered and removed as part of the

Easter egg purge.



Riffing on Larry, 13 years later:
A note on that rogue Exchange 5.0 Easter egg that
my program kept triggering by mistake:
Triggering the Easter egg by mistake is bad enough,
but what made it even worse was that once you triggered it,
the session was poisoned:
Commands would behave erratically from that point onward.
You had to disconnect from the server and reconnect
in order to fix the problem.
So yeah, bad Easter egg.

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The numerology of the sample directory listing in the Windows 95 font selector property sheet page

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