The LaserWriter was like something from the future compared to the Laserjet. I think they used the same Canon print engine, but the HP was far less sophisticated. It only used bitmap fonts, nothing scalable like Adobe's Type 1 for Postscript. Knuth probably used a supercomputer for his typesetting.
I once worked at a company that used a Code39 font cartridge in HP Laserjets. When HP stopped putting font cartridge slots in their printers, I had the task of intercepting print jobs and detecting the font selection sequence, then taking the text and converting it to a Code128 bitmap graphic. It wasn't hard at all, kind of fun actually.
In 8-bit (per channel) color there is a standard for when the context is unspecified: sRGB. It was developed to match the characteristics of a "typical" display at the time of its creation. It won't be 100% accurate, but it represents the best you can assume. You're not forced to throw up your hands and give up.
Thermos bottles are relatively heavier to their contents than flimsier bottles. That goes double if they're only half full. I have a couple of the recalled bottles, so I just weighed one - 14 ounces empty.
If you blow up a satellite, half of it will end up going slower and half will go faster. The slower bits will probably burn up nicely, but the faster bits will just elevate their orbit.
The biggest problem was when there was an established protocol, but it wasn't always followed. I remember scroll bars being the worst. Usually you could respond to the messages and everything would work the way you want, but there were some edge cases where Windows would update those scroll bars without even telling you it was doing so. And of course it would paint those updates in the default colors.
I honestly don't know if Qt would have made it any easier. But this was a large and old app that relied on Win32 at its core, and nobody was going to accept rewriting it for just one feature. Plus our customers were very time sensitive, and anything that could have slowed it down by a few ms was off the table.
But it wasn't just one window, there were lots of controls on that window and the relationship between them wasn't as obvious as you'd assume. Trust me, recreating the whole thing from scratch was easier.
The fun part was making a C++ class that could build up an in-memory dialog template. You had to do it that way because it was dynamically sized based on the message you displayed and the buttons you needed. If you used the default colors, you might be able to tell they were different if you squinted but you wouldn't know which was mine and which was Microsoft's.
I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new feature. That's when you find out that certain Windows features like scroll bars under certain conditions bypass the usual message loop completely, because they know they can get away with it. The part I remember most vividly was recreating the lowly MessageBox from scratch, because none of the internals of the system supplied one were exposed in a way that you could modify them.
I know mine sure did! As a kid I was totally uncoordinated, always the last one to be picked for any sports teams. But I definitely noticed the difference when I picked up juggling as a young adult.