I wonder how much of the later trend is due to the combination of early autocompletion and a codebase the size of windows or office, in a language where types can't be determined for sure without running each source file through the preprocessor. And most source files include the massive windows.h or some equally large hairball.

I assume that global variables would be horrible in such an environment, but typing out the prefix and maybe one letter of the actual name would cut the completion list down to a manageable size.

Perhaps apps hungarian started because it helped avoid common errors in complex GUI logic, then similar practices were carried over to the systems side where they were useful for mostly unrelated reasons, eventually reaching the world in general through the header files produced by the systems folks but lacking any of the context or history needed to go beyond "microsoft does it that way, there must be a good reason". Hopefully I'm just being overly pessimistic and extrapolating from massively insufficient information, though...