This is indeed similar in the effects, but completely different in the cause to the phenomenon referenced in the article (device pixel ratio vs pixel aspect ratio).<p>What you're referring to stems from the assumption made a long time ago by Microsoft to simplify the development of Windows, later adopted as a de facto standard by most computer software. The assumption was that the pixel density of every display is 96 pixels-per-inch [1].<p>As the pixel density of today's displays has grown much beyond that, mostly popularized by Apple's Retina, a solution was needed to accommodate legacy software written under this assumption. This resulted in the decoupling of "logical" pixels from "physical" pixels, with the logical resolution being most commonly defined as the "what the resolution of the display would be given its physical size and a PPI of 96" [2], and the physical resolution representing the real amount of pixels. The 100x100 and 200x200 values in your example are respectively the logical and physical resolutions of your screenshot.<p>Different software vendors refer to these "logical" pixels differently, but the most names you're going to encounter are points (Apple), density-independent pixels ("DPs", Google), and device-independent pixels ("DIPs", Microsoft).<p>[1]: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/where-does-96-dpi-come-from-in-windows" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/whe...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/devicePixelRatio#value" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/devi...</a>
Thanks for sharing - it’s interesting to see how choices from the past continue to shape technology today.
I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure print and web were already more popular than anything Apple did. The need to be aware of output size and scale pixels was not at all uncommon by the time retina displays came out.<p>From what I recall only Microsoft had problems with this, and specifically on Windows. You might be right about software that was exclusive to desktop Windows. I don't remember having scaling issues even on other Microsoft products such as Windows Mobile.
Print was always density-independent. The web, at least how I rememeber it, for the longest time was "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600", and later 1024x768, until vector-based Flash came along :)<p>It's the desktop software that mostly had problems scaling. I'm not sure about Windows Mobile. Windows Phone and UWP have adopted an Android-like model.