Dave W Plummer
@davepl1968
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Hi! I'm Dave Plummer. You might remember me from such Windows components as Task Manager, Windows Pinball, Calc, ZIPFolders, Product Activation, etc. Cheers!
Joined June 2010
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How I spent 1996:
My boss wandered into my office and said "Hey Dave, do you want to rewrite pinball for Windows NT?". I said "Hell ya" and got paid to write and play pinball for two months... while listening to Soundgarden. And kudos to the original designers for a classic!
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I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.
We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from…
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This is me at Microsoft in 1994, posing with the dollar bill I won in a bet over the Windows 95 shell.
I was working with a guy named Bob Day and a few other devs to port the Windows 95 user interface over to Windows NT. Even though a year of work would remain for Unicode…
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Big news! Someone finally noticed that if you hold down CTRL, the process list in Task Manager conveniently freezes so you can select rows without them jumping around.
I did this so you could sort by CPU and other dynamic columns but then still be able to click stuff...
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This is the Corvette that Windows zip folders bought.
Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew…
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Task manager trivia: "Keeping it Small"
When you press ctrl-shift-esc, winlogon launches taskmgr.exe, and the first thing it does it look for a running instance and activate that instead if it passes certain runtime tests.
That means it takes at least as long to activate task…
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The story of how adding ZIP support to Windows almost got me fired...
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I'm so old that I helped write this. MS-DOS for the win!
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Trivia: Windows Zip support was written by someone who actually paid for WinRAR...
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Everyone has a story of the car they used to have. Except me.
My Dad bought this Pontiac new in 1969 at MidWest Motors in Regina, SK, Canada. In 1984, when I turned 16, it became my car. And I've kept it, fixed it, restored it, and driven it ever since.
In about 1988 I was…
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As the original dev mgr for Windows Product Activation, this tickles me in a special way :-)
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I worked on Space Cadet Pinball (the port to Windows), and here's the secret back door that remains to this day. There were technical reasons for keeping it that won't fit in the margin.
Type "hidden test" without the quotes to activate it.
Press H to edit the high scores.…
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@thomas_entner
It wasn't, most of it was very well thought out. It's not fair to extrapolate from an edge case like this to the rest of the product, and that's kinda the point of the story.
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After almost 20 years, finally got to meet Mark Russinovich and chat about Regmon, Filemon, Task Manager and more...
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I see a lot of new developers struggling to find their way, and here's my advice:
First, you have to love what you do. If you don't, now is the time to try truck driving school or some other venture. You can make money in software engineering, but if you wouldn't do it for…
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Task Manager NT4: 85,430 bytes
Task Manager Win11: 5,439,256 bytes
That's a ratio of 64:1
Now I'm not picking on the current team, because it does a lot more today, it's 64-bit code, has themes and dark mode, and so on.
But small code can be beautiful...
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@LinusTech
@Microsoft
Can't speak to the IP issue, but I'd wear it, and I was on the team that wrote it.
Just for posterity: I think Marc Fortier was the specific author of Pipes and Maze, but don't know who did the logo one.
The 3DText one has an easter egg if you enter "ILOVENT" or "NOTEVIL"...
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The Mind Behind Windows:
A sneak peek at my upcoming interview with Windows Architect, Dave Cutler.
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Another Task Manager Secret Hack: Hold down CTRL while clicking on "New Task" to bypass the shell and get an instant administrator command prompt.
Intended to save your butt when the system is so borked you can't do anything else, or as a shortcut for a command window.
Check…
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What's stopping YOU from coding like this?
BTW, "Vivid" for MacBook Pros is a big enabler for this. It allows you to use the Mac's HDR display to overdrive the screen so that you can still work with sunglasses on and in bright environments. Not sponsored, but recommended!…
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@frankoz95967943
You lost me. Lots of 30 year old code still works on Windows, and lots of 30 year old code is still in Windows. So they seem similar to me - how do you conclude from it that Linux is superior?
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For fun, I installed the original Windows NT4 Task Manager on 64-core Threadripper under Win11. It works! It only displays 8 graphs, and each graph displays 4 CPUs. There as no real way to test that at the time! Amazing the stats still work with those values!
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Secret Task Manager tip from the author:
Start Task Manager any time, anywhere, simply by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, which I picked because it's quick and easy with one hand!
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My real PDP-11/70 panel booting RSX-11M... with audio :-)
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@_devJNS
I always find there's one other person who had the same problem and then comes back to say they solved it, without saying what the solution was.
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@d_bargna
Remember anything will take 100% of the CPU while starting, at least on a single core machine, but just for the very first frame. I considered throwing that sample away, but why lie? It was busy loading taskmgr!
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Are Programmers Obsolete? Should you still pursue software engineering in 2024?
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@debagnik17
The original Maxis game was a mix of C/C++ and raw assembly language. The one in Windows, which I worked on, is all C++ because it had to run equally well on PowerPC, Alpha AXP, MIPS, and Intel.
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@SergiiKirianov
I've been coding for 40 years and I still run stuff a second time hoping it'll be different.
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Task Manager: Secrets from the Original Author
Follow me for more inside stories!
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If my Mac tried to sell me Candy Crush on the desktop I'd rip the SSD out with significant violence, or at least wipe it and start fresh.
And I, for one, would pay $249 for Windows Pro with no telemetry, advertising, or upsells. Let your huddled masses pirate it for free and…
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Inside the Windows Source Code Part 2!
Please share it if you enjoy this detailed code coverage!
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@chickenstrip007
Not if you raise them well. I'm three SD from mean and never used (hard) drugs, started at 7-Eleven, put myself through college, built my own business and started a family. Plus I've got ASD so a lot of that was uphill. Your lack of faith is disturbing.
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@WhatAintInside
Keep in mind I'd asked for permission and got it in writing BEFORE I started. But yes, it was generous of MSFT to allow me that flexibility right from the first date of hire...
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@RpsAgainstTrump
I sent this to my teenage daughter so she'd know to be afraid. Not of wearing shorts, but of weird preachers.
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The Mind Behind Windows!
My full interview with industry legend Dave Cutler, designer of RSX11, VMS, and Windows.
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@KevinNaughtonJr
I wrote most of the stuff I did for Windows on a 100MHz MIPS box with a 15" monitor and a Dell keyboard. It snowed most days, and the walk to the bathroom was uphill both ways.
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Can you solve this simple problem? Most people get it wrong, as do some calculators.
At one time, I owned development for Windows Calculator, so I investigate whether even it can do it and why so many people (and calculators!) get it wrong.
Please share if you enjoy: It's my…
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My new book on the spectrum is done; just proofing! Now I need cool, famous people on the spectrum to read it and give me awesome cover comments :-)
@elonmusk
perhaps?
If the cover image speaks to you, let me know if you'd review a copy. Here's the blurb:
"Whether you’ve…
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@HerbsandDirt
Carole, I had Autism, ADHD, and Ulcerative Colitis. We just didn't wear it in public so you simply didn't know it.
Don't punish awareness as if it were a contagion.
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@ThePrestonParra
Something to do with the time they fired the ovens to make sure EVERYONE looked like that.
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@iamyesyouareno
Come on, Russian bot, that Nazi trolling might fly in your hometown, but posting pictures of Aryan families won't rile up Americans, because we're too smart to fall for that.
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@strike_dr
Rocket science is it? When you had nothing to conserve, you wanted everyone to be liberal with THEIR stuff.
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Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: The light works in MY office!
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Understanding the Linux Back Door Shenanigans and the implications for open source:
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Booting my Altair 8800 into CP/M from 8" floppy using the front panel switches....
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Vinyl is for people that can't afford reel to reel :-)
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@apocsantos
So far as I'm aware, it's worked on x64 for a decade or more. There was a bug that manifested on one of the other platforms, like IA64 or Alpha, that caused collision detection not to work, so they couldn't ship it in the box at all. But x64 is out there somewhere.
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@thrmack
Check out this file for some super-basic ball physics. It's just gravity for a bouncing ball, but might give you ideas!
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I'd like to start a bar and name it after my brother, called "The Jim". Then people could brag about how often they go to the Jim.
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My full interview with Raymond Chen, a 30-year developer on the Windows team.
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@ksorbs
Never be afraid to attribute to malice that which is sufficiently explained as coincidence. This is 14 years ago, and Easter lands on a different day each year.
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I try to avoid angry posts, but this time I couldn't contain myself.
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Ever wanted to set up a transparent filtering bridge for your home LAN? That's where you build a miniPC with an IN port and an OUT port and it runs packet inspection and attack prevention filtering. So your cable modem doesn't change, your router doesn't change, and neither…
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@BowTiedRanger
Do you believe in a God so uncreative they did it through magic and party tricks?
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@PassMarkInc
It's always bugged me that you sometimes need to break out DISKPART.EXE to do things that UI cannot...
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@MalevolentAstra
Call me when you're done generalizing about people based on their race. Then the real work can begin.
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@samathingamajig
Well, thinking out loud: start menu, desktop, shell, format, pinball, calc, media center, and product activation...
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Remember the Starbucks rules: Silver Macbook for screenplays, Black Macbook for coding.
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The last thing the Terminator sees before jumping the truck off the overpass in Terminator 2 is a Plummer street sign!
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@mgdotdev
I'm an assembly/C++ coder since birth and think Python is amazing. 96% of everything could be written in it. Everyone should know it!
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@tiny_kiri
I've been coding 40+ years, and anything you can have ChatGPT do for you, do it. You should be working on the hard parts, not the boilerplate.
When you're neck-deep in a cross-thread reference count race condition, your puny AI god cannot save you. That's when you earn your…
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@TomiLahren
Would it not be more intelligent to assess the actual data in terms of how virulent it is, whether small droplets are the vector, and so on?
Or you could decide in advance based on politics, like all good health care decisions are made. That works too.
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@DonaldTNews
Arrest him so he can spend time sitting in prison thinking about not having purchased the limited slip differential.
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