When Microsoft was developing Windows 95, developers discovered that SimCity had a severe memory bug that caused it to crash on the new operating system—but instead of forcing the game studio to fix it, Microsoft engineers actually rewrote the core Windows 95 source code to detect if SimCity was running and safely allocate memory for it. (opens in new tab)

Somewhere in the source code of Windows 95 — one of the most widely used pieces of software ever released — there is a small block of code whose only job is to ask a single, oddly specific question. Is the user currently running SimCity? If the answer is yes, Windows 95 quietly changes how […]