History of the Registry

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beanman101283

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I was in a conversation with someone on another forum about the Windows registry and they were getting nostalgic about the days of INI files and being able to move programs from computer to computer just by copying the program directory. This got me wondering why the registry was introduced in the first place.

Off the top of my head, i guess you can argue that it makes it harder for users to mess up program settings if they decide to poke around a program's directory. Is the registry faster to access than text files? I haven't done any programming with the registry so i don't know the advantages or disadvantages of using it from that point of view. I'm pretty familiar with the structure of it from poking around in there but i try stay out of regedit unless i have no other choice.

Just wondering.
 
Having a centralized registry is much easier. All your system wide information is there. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass, but all in all, it's a lot better than individual ini files.
 
Amanda said:
Having a centralized registry is much easier.
Click to expand...
And there you have it...

Ex: Making changes to .ini files in an enterprise environment to alter a program's behavior would be a nightmare. Any machine w/o the default program path wouldn't be affected.
 
Ok, that actually makes a lot of sense. Having a standard place to store data across multiple machines is a good idea.
 
Yes, the registry is faster. Most of it is loaded into memory where an ini file has to be read from a disk. The disk has to seek to the file, etc. etc. etc.
 
I think it was introducted with Windows 95 but I can be mistaken.
 
Xilikon said:
I think it was introducted with Windows 95 but I can be mistaken.
Click to expand...
Windows 3.1 had a small registry. It held things like file associations. It was nothing near what it is today.
 
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