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In context: In the event you have been a Home windows consumer within the ’90s, you are more likely to be intimately acquainted with the long-lasting Begin Menu that shipped with Home windows NT. That signature vertical banner proclaiming “Home windows NT Workstation,” or whichever variant you have been operating, is a picture seared into the minds of many PC customers from the period, and we have now programmer Dave Plummer to thank for bringing the branding factor to life.
In a submit on X/Twitter, the Home windows veteran pulled again the curtain on simply how that Begin Menu banner got here to be, highlighting each the cleverness of his answer and the technical constraints of constructing software program within the ’90s.
The important thing challenge was that Home windows NT had a number of SKUs – server, workstation, and the like – throughout varied languages. Doing distinctive bitmapped banners for every permutation would have been troublesome and extra resource-heavy. So Plummer determined to work round this by rendering that banner textual content and gradient dwell with code.
The concept could sound easy at the moment, however sideways textual content rendering was no piece of cake within the days earlier than trendy internet applied sciences. Fortunately, as Plummer recounts, Home windows NT launched the power to rotate the system context – a functionality its Home windows 9x predecessor lacked. This allowed him to make use of normal system fonts, rotating the context 90 levels to realize that iconic vertical textual content format.
If I had a LinkedIn bio, I would positively point out that I wrote the Home windows Begin Menu.
Effectively, the non-resume model is that I wrote the code that custom-paints the Begin menu, attracts the sideways textual content, background gradient, and so forth. It had been performed with a Bitmap in Home windows 95,… pic.twitter.com/QgQqhSFi8w
– Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) July 14, 2024
The background gradient impact mimicking the blue-to-black colour transition on Home windows NT’s packaging was one other piece Plummer cleverly rendered dwell utilizing normal GDI calls.
“I used normal GDI calls to render the background gradient, which fades blue-black just like the sky on the NT field, then fill something previous that with strong black,” he wrote.
The outcome was a clear, scalable banner completely matched to the working system’s distinct visible identification.
Plummer admits he was nonetheless inexperienced when tasked with the Begin Menu code. “I would solely been coding for Home windows a number of months at that time, so it was cool to find it was even doable,” he recalled.
When requested if graphics designers have been concerned, Plummer stated he didn’t recall their participation, and that he merely replicated the Home windows 95 designers’ imaginative and prescient programmatically for NT. He wasn’t positive if matching the NT field artwork was his name or a designer’s, however stated graphic design was not in his lane.
Talking of graphics, this technique did have one quirky disadvantage. One commenter lamented the lack of an outdated trick the place customers might swap the static bitmap with {custom} paintings. To that, Plummer responded that changing the banner with “tall, skinny porn” was a factor.
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