Comment Re:We can do that thing you like (Score 4, Informative) 230
DLL hell was *very* real in the Windows 9x days. Side-by-side assemblies was introduced with Windows 98SE (IIRC) - but really only became de rigueur with Windows XP. During the 9x days, software developers took advantage of the fact that nothing prevented them from writing files to the system directories. When they encountered a problem where they needed a DLL - they simply installed it in the system directory - often overwriting whatever was there before. Obviously this caused all sorts of problems where only the latest installed product had a robust state.
To add to this, Microsoft shipped a faulty copy of mfc42.dll with Visual C++ 6. It removed a bunch of functions.
Now, keep in mind that mfc42.dll was used by any MFC applications compiled by Visual C++ 4.2-6.x... including Netscape, Microsoft Publisher, and a number of other programs.
Oh, did I mention that MFC was the recommended way of writing Windows programs back then?
Incidentally, Microsoft started including the VC++ version number in its DLL names again after this thanks to that screwup... which they had done before (vc++ 4.1 had mfc41.dll, etc...)