[jonathanlydall]

Fun fact, Windows 8 changed the decimal separator for the South African locale from a period to a comma.

My theory is that some academic or idiot government official told Microsoft they're not using the official separator who duly fixed it. But in practice every "normal" person in the country used a period as a separator.

By default, Excel now uses a comma separator for decimals. Which unless I change it, makes it especially fun when I want to paste values into my banking website which (like most of the country) uses a period as a separator.

Really, it would have been way more pragmatic if South Africa just changed its official decimal separator.

It also caused some annoying issues on our .NET with SQL Server software project. For example SQL seed scripts inserting decimal values would break depending on if they were being run on Windows 7 or 8. On the upside, it did teach us all to have our code be properly locale aware.

[benjijay]

Tangentially reminds me of how, in an early build of Win11, the localisation team at M$ changed 'zip' to 'postcode' for the GB language pack

People then had a lot of fun being unable to extract their .postcode archive files which suddenly came into existence...

[ygra]

AFAIR it was the localized name of the file type. File extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.

[lproven]

> File extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.

Yeah they did. Notably, Microsoft did it.

Source: me. I spent 3 hours at the Venezuelan Embassy in London trying to get Microsoft Works for DOS to accept a new printer driver. I had the driver disk (in UK English) and I had Works and DOS (in LatAm Spanish.)

(My Spanish boss gave me the job, porque yo hablo un poquito de Español.)

MS Works wouldn't register the driver, whether installed, or manually decompressed and copied.

Eventually I worked it out. English-language Works called printer drivers `.PRD`, for "Printer Description" or something like that. Spanish-language Works called them `.DIM` for "Descripción de Impresora" or words to that effect.

Rename `OKIDAT24.PRD` to `OKIDAT24.DIM` and Spanish Works immediately saw it and the printer could be selected in Preferences and it worked perfectly.

Yes, filenames and even file extensions get translated sometimes.

Note for those too young to have used MS/PC/DR DOS: it did not have printer driver support, at all. It sent plain text to the PRN: or LPT1: port device, and nothing but plain text.

(OK, or LPT2: or LPT3: -- but I don't think I ever saw a machine with multiple selectable printers. It was cheaper and easier to buy a physical printer switch box and turn the dial than fit an extra ISA card with a Centronics port, and then configure it to have its own IRQ line.)

Apps did that for themselves. So, each DOS app had to have its own dedicated printer drivers.