It goes earlier than that. Here's a bit from a presentation that Tony Williams (considered the "co-creator of COM") gave once about the Registry: http://i.imgur

It goes earlier than that. Here's a bit from a presentation that Tony Williams (considered the "co-creator of COM") gave once about the Registry: http://i.imgur.com/52YiK2Y.gifv http://i.imgur.com/52YiK2Y.gifv Essentially, the Registry was a stop-gap to store configuration information about COM in Windows 3.1 until Cairo came along (which never did). Then the Windows 95 guys came around and decided to use it as the replacement for .ini files. And the rest is history.