The Minority Report

Earlier this month, Mr. Chen on his blog The Old New Thing wrote and interesting post on an award bestowed by some Internet association on the Best Web Authoring tool.

Turns out that Notepad, the extremely simple text editor (mostly the edit control with a wrapper) included in Windows, won.

Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool.

We didn’t find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, “Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with the award for Best Web authoring tool. Please let us know who the author of Notepad is, so that we can invite them to the award ceremony.”

Yup, Notepad won the award for Best Web authoring tool.
The Old New Thing : Hey, is there somebody around to accept this award?

So Mr. Chen goes on the hunt for the original author of Notepad, which I think should be relatively easy but it would seem that nobody wanted to admit to it…lol

The original author of Notepad also served as the development manager for Windows 95. His job was to herd the cats that made up the programmers who worked on Windows 95, a job which you can imagine falls into the “not easy” category.
The Old New Thing : We found the author of Notepad, sorry you didn’t go to the award ceremony

Stuff like this is cool and I hope that Mr. Chen tracks down some more historical items regarding Windows and it’s development.