Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has confirmed what we all suspected about Windows 95: it guessed when a setup program was running. Rather than relying on any special flag or marker, Chen explained that Windows 95 looked at the program's name to determine whether it was a setup application. It did this by checking the app against a list of magic words. If the program name contained one of them, it must be a setup. Chen gave the list: setup, install, inst, imposta, ayarla, and felrak. While modern developers might look in horror at the sheer randomness of the concept – after all, these days it is easy to detect when a package is being disgorged in Windows – things were different in the 1990s, and Microsoft's operating system...

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