Secret Life of Windows Task Manager - The Oxford University Address

Live at Oxford: Find out what it was like to interview and work at a Microsoft career in the 1990s as Dave Plummer reprises his talk on his history as a Microsoft developer and how he came into that role, as well as discussions of various projects such as the Windows Task Manager, Zip Folders, Product Activation, Space Cadet Pinball, and much more...
Dave covers topics ranging from the "art of code" to "whiteboard interviews" and more.

[LordMegatherium]

I know the helicopter story a bit differently:

A guy gets lost in a hot-air balloon and calls down to a man on the ground
"Where am I?"
"You're in a balloon."
"Oh, you must be an engineer!"
"How did you deduce that?"
"Because your answer is as precise as it is unhelpful."
"You must be a manager!"
"How did you deduce that?"
"Because you got yourself where you are through hot air and incompetence and are now trying to shift the blame to someone else."

[bensonprice]

I like the idea of the "Dave" prefix on functions. It makes me think if there's a "DaveKillChildren" function or process.

[ZippyFL]

The bit about adding your name to the classes and then never getting around to changing the names later reminds me of a saying we have at my software company: "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works."

[PemboPemberton]

Oxford Uni. My old stomping ground back in the early 90's.
Also coded demo's weekly on Saturday afternoons on the C64 in Tandy & WH Smiths.
The manager noticed & asked if I would save them, as they were attracting customers who went on to buy.
They'd pay me for doing the visual demo's each week & I bought a C64 with what I'd saved, aged 14 at the time, then an Amiga 500 later on.
Went on to work at IBM, Sony, Lucas Aerospace & now British Aerospace.
Still got a love for low-level bare-metal coding, which I do on ESP8266 & ESP32 microcontrollers in my spare time.
It's amazing hearing the path you took.

- Constantly enjoying your videos from here in the UK.

😎👌

[jackgerberuae]

Quite a compliment to present to Oxford 👍
I used to sat staring at the defrag blocks moving around for hours. It was like magic, especially as you could hear the HD labor in sync.

[ender-gaming]

This is a great recap of all the stories he's told so far, but to anyone reading this after watching, go watch his videos he put out on each topic. There is so much more additional technical information that honestly you'll practically never hear anywhere else.

[metalpunk]

It doesn't matter how many times I hear these stories from your other videos: this stuff is so fascinating!

[McDuffington]

Watching Norton Speeddisk was a favourite pasttime of mine as well!

[jimr]

Dave, could you please do a short review of the registry. Why was it needed, what issues did it resolve? It always seemed to me a potential point of failure if it ever got corrupted. Thanks

[mrhamel]

18:00 "There could be a whole spectrum of reasons why, but I think I'm just wired that way." - That's a good line.

[Tarex_]

Gotta say i have enjoyed listening to the story on each video it's been in now.. don't know how many more times, but until now it's always been a joy

[nacnud_]

6.22 rocked :) Thanks for those efforts :)

[estranhokonsta]

Task manager is still the first window that i open when i logon on a windows machine. Fortunately windows has come a long way and most of the times, now, i only use it occasionally to check the processes without bothering them :)

[bitcortex]

That bit counting algorithm is my favorite ever. There's just something about the way it combines bitwise and arithmetic operations. Reminds me of Euler's identity.

[siddiksalim]

Dear Dave,
I really the enjoy the content that you put up on YouTube. Your videos on the Windows task manager and 'programming language drag race' are a couple of my favorites.
I am sure a lot of us here would like to see you code a small-scale application from scratch using the programming style that you used back at Microsoft.

[Wrackey]

Ahhh.. to be a kid that knows more about PC tech than the shop that sells it. It wasn't that early for me, but still plenty of fun was had in the 90s in walking into a store and asking questions to store clerks that they couldn't answer. Educating the clerk about how much cache the CPU he sold ACTUALLY had, or just leaving the store after 2 clerks started arguing about how much CPU power you really need to decode DVD video without a DVD decoder card, was great fun :P.. I ended up working for one of these companies later while I was working on my degree. At the interview, they just asked me how I had my drives configured. I told them I had the boot drive on IDE master, and the CD-ROM on IDE slave, and they offered me a job, right there and then :P

[WRND]

Task Manager is one of my favorite Windows components. I use it nearly daily. Thank you.
Also, the thumbnail for this video sparked an interesting conversation between my wife, daughter, and me. I compared it to a painting of an arm painting itself. I love the idea of you having this many CPU threads and running something on specific threads to load them up just right to make this image, even if it likely isn't true.

[shau]

I've only just come across your channel and it's all fascinating to me. The first product I worked on had a unix server process that shut down with message along the lines of "head honcho is dying and killing all it's children"

[thomasandrews]

I have watched all of this in old videos...still enjoyed it again

[GeorgeMulak]

What is so crazy for me is that I can relate o what you are saying. Thank you for sharing. Very fun. God bless you.