[vetinari]

Actually, the really old windows stuff did support scaling - the 'Large fonts (120%)' option was there almost forever. I remember that original Delphi, circa 1995, supported it.

Just most apps chose to ignore it, the developers took the 'anyone uses 96 dpi anyway' attitude and at the end of 90's most applications started to suck at 120 dpi.

[pjmlp]

Yep, Windows API already had support for logical pixels in the 16 bit days and all good books always preached to convert between logical pixels and physical ones.

I guess people got lazy, as you say.

[kpil]

I think that the monitors stayed more or less the same later pixel density for a very long time. Is only been gradually increasing very slowly for 20 years, until a few years ago.

No point in spending time on logical pixels if it makes almost no relevant difference...

It's