I’ve always been fascinated by the information maintained in the Windows Registry. But in order to understand this, to really get a view into this, you have to know a little bit about my background. The first computer I remember actually using was a Timex-Sinclair 1000, just like the one in the image shown to the right. You connected it to the TV, programs were created via the keyboard and usually copied from “recipes” in the manual or in a magazine, and the “programs” could be saved to or loaded from a tape in a tape recorder. Yes, you read that right…a tape recorder. I was programming BASIC programs on this system, and then on a Mac IIe. After that, it was the Epson QX-10, and then for a very long time, in high school and then in college (I started college in August, 1985), the TRS-80.
The point of all of this is that the configuration of these systems, particularly as we moved to systems running MS-DOS, was handled through configuration files, particularly autoexec.bat and a myriad *.ini files. Even when I started using Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, the same held true…configuration files. We started to see the beginnings of the Registry with Windows 95, and files such as system.dat.
Even from the very beginning of my experience with the Windows Registry, the amount and range of information stored in this data source has been absolutely incredible. In 2005, Cory Altheide and I published the first pa
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