The limit was global, so you could royally screw things up, but it was also a very high limit for the time, 65k GDI handles. In practice, hitting this before running out of hardware resources was unlikely, and basically required leaking the handles or doing something fantastically stupid (as was the style at the time). There was also a per process 10k GDI handle limit that could be modified, and Windows 2000 reduced the global limit to 16k.
It was the Windows 9x days, so of course you could also just royally screw things up by just writing to whatever memory or hardware you felt like, with few limits.
> It was the Windows 9x days, so of course you could also just royally screw things up by just writing to whatever memory or hardware you felt like, with few limits.
You say that, but when I actually tried I found that despite not actually having robust memory protection, it's not as though it's particularly straightforward. You certainly wouldn't do it by accident... I can't imagine, anyway.
It was the Windows 9x days, so of course you could also just royally screw things up by just writing to whatever memory or hardware you felt like, with few limits.