I vividly remember the days of Windows 95,98,Me,etc and manually having to make changes to the registry. It always felt extremely hard to navigate, poorly designed, fragile, and a source of much technical debt. What is the origination of the registry? Why hasn't it been replaced with a modern key/value store?
It's the same old story: What looks like the worst possible tech solution _now_ was leaps and bounds better than what came before.<p>Previously, Windows apps that wanted have simple, persistent configuration/state variables would either have to roll their own config file buried in a subfolder somewhere or resort to putting them in the global Environment Variables.<p>The Windows Registry was massively better because it was centralized, hierarchical and allowed hundreds of apps to store thousands of settings in an organized way.<p>What you should really be asking is: What happened to the content-addressable hierarchical, distributed and object-oriented file store that was supposed replace the DOS file system we're still (basically) using today?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Registry#" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Registry#</a><p>Google is your friend.