winhelp

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has a short, clarifying answer to a quirk of Windows history: WinHelp was called an “online help” system not because it required the Internet, but because its content was immediately available to the computer—that is, the help was “online” in the old...

Windows 3.0’s help system was called “online” long before the web, and the distinction points to a small but revealing shift in how engineers—and later users—used the words online and offline to describe availability, not connectivity. Recent attention to an Old New Thing post by veteran...