Windows at 1000 Frames Per Second: The Raymond Chen Interview
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- Опубліковано 9 чер 2024
- Windows Pinball, IBM, debugging, the confidential coffee maker, losing your car keys, and more: Dave interviews Raymond Chen, a 30-year developer on Windows at Microsoft. For my book on Asperger's/ASD, please check out: amzn.to/3GcdeUM
For Raymond's book The Old New Thing: amzn.to/40Qhvad
3D Pinball animation by Jack Bertram: / @jackbertram
My other channel, join now so you're there for episode 01 of my AudioBook!
/ @davepl
Discord Chat w/ Myself and Subscribers: / discord
Primary Equipment (Amazon Affiliate Links):
* Camera: Sony FX-3 - amzn.to/3w31C0Z
* Camera Lens: 50mm F1.4 Art DG HSM - amzn.to/3kEnYk4
* Microphone: Electro-Voice RE 320 - amzn.to/37gL65g
* Teleprompter: Glide Gear TMP 100 - amzn.to/3MN2nlA
* Teleprompter Monitor: amzn.to/3YWCSFC
* SD Cards: Sony TOUGH - amzn.to/38QZGR9
* Aputure 300d II Light: amzn.to/46axuRZ
CHAPTERS
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:39 The "special edition" of Windows 95
00:02:07 The absence of 64-bit Pinball in Windows
00:03:15 The 64-bit Windows project initially targeted Itanium processors
00:04:46 During the 64-bit Windows project, resolving Pinball's collision detection problem
00:06:00 Pinball's removal from the 64-bit Windows
00:07:23 The fix for Pinball might have involved a floating point rounding issue
00:08:47 Testing for Pinball's collision detection problem
00:11:05 Raymond once received a death threat
00:12:30 Raymond joined Microsoft after applying for graduate school
00:16:07 Raymond's consistent jacket and tie attire
00:18:52 Raymond leverages his extensive network at Microsoft
00:19:31 The term "hive" in the Windows registry
00:21:06 Users sometimes tend to avoid answering dialogues they find confusing or unnecessary
00:23:06 Windows 95 faced challenges with its time zone map
00:30:35 Taskbar grouping
00:34:29 Designing intuitive vending machine interfaces
00:36:49 Windows team had mascots like "Bear," "Bunny," and "Piglet,"
00:42:14 The "USB Cart of Death" was a cart loaded with multiple USB devices used for testing USB functionality
00:46:11 Porting from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows
00:50:31 Dave Cutler
00:52:06 Bill Gates
00:53:01 Windows Power Toys
00:56:12 Tweaking Windows with 'Tweak UI'
00:59:37 Microsoft's policy shift against offering unsupported downloads
01:03:49 The innovative approach to Windows 95 compatibility testing
01:07:32 A dive into game compatibility
01:10:16 Race conditions in multitasking OSs
01:12:21 Raymond Chen fixed Windows Pinball's CPU usage issue
01:14:31 The time travel debugger
01:18:23 Color-coding files (blue for compressed, green for encrypted
01:20:49 Usability studies observing users
01:23:19 Windows 286 and 386
01:25:07 Long file names stored in Unicode
01:28:33 Misaligned data in processors like RISC led to significant performance issues
01:31:52 Splitting a PC into two workstations
01:32:44 Game developers thanked Raymond Chen for getting their games to work on Windows 95
01:34:59 Raymond Chen had an unused VIP ticket to the Windows 95 launch but gave it away;
01:36:08 Colleagues on the Windows NT printing team crafted forgeries of Windows 95 launch tickets
01:38:27 Microsoft employees brought a coffee maker to IBM's office
01:43:17 Steve Ballmer left his rental car at an IBM parking lot
01:45:23 Dave once lost his rental car keys on the beach
01:46:30 Raymond's early hacking and reverse engineering skills
01:51:49 Raymond's transition from mathematics to software engineering
01:52:48 Raymond's father was a mechanical engineering professor
01:56:02 Raymond Chen talks about decluttering his cables
01:56:57 Chen maintains a six-month content buffer for his blog
01:58:18 Windows 95 debugging involved handling programs that allocated excessive memory
02:00:21 Compatibility challenges for Win95 included issues with DOS extenders
02:03:04 Debugging strategy involved trapping and correcting code that disabled interrupts - Наука та технологія
Raymond Chen is one of my favorite Microsoft employees. Really smart guy, his "the old new thing" is an essential book for Windows fans.
Every Windows developer has at some point found themselves at Raymond's blog, trying to solve some really obscure Windows coding issue.
@@robbie_ Back in the day when I worked in Windows this was exactly the case. We were exploring the brave new world of 64 bits, and an Old New Thing post about a registry setting to get Windows to allocate from the top of the address space exposed many issues in our code.
Raymond's book is a must read. The lengths at which the Windows team has went to make thousands of misbehaving programs run on all versions of Windows is mind-boggling. There's no other platform that can run 30 year old binaries natively on the most recent OS version. That sort of things matter when there's mission critical software whose source code is lost, compilers are no longer present and all the developers have died years ago. Incredible stuff.
Wincrap is full of shit. Change my mind.
@@synestetic1687missing source code, no compilers, old, mysterious and mission critical. Haha I think it would shock people how many parts of important systems are operating like this.
I was wondering where I had heard Raymond's name before, because when I read the title I felt this feeling of awe and respect - then I remembered that Raymond Chen was the name on literally every single helpful Windows-related blog post on the Microsoft site ever and that I had read his name hundreds of times when finding solutions for problems that no-one else could answer.
You could turn this kind of interviews into a podcast, post it to podcast platforms and I think it could be a hit.
- How to ruin the great interview?
- Make a yellowest clickbait title ever.
Yeah great idea - i need a Dave Plummer podcast in my life
i was literally just looking in the video detail for a podcast link; praying it would exist!
@@fffUUUUUUWhat are you talking about? What do you mean by "yellowest"?
@@oskarlh it refers to yellow journalism, which employs extreme exaggeration or sensationalism.
I agree, this interview doesn't require or deserve a bait title. The title surely doesn't ruin the content, however.
This channel is reason enough to fire Microsoft's entire PR department. Dave is single handedly putting a human face onto Microsoft and brings out _real engineers_ through the cracks in the facade of the corporate monolith. This is unprecedented - no other company is so fortunate to have an enthusiast-produced channel with 560K subscribers where people watch interviews with their engineers 40K times per day. Kudos from an ex-blue badge.
They don't have any PR staff... 🤦🏼♂️
A lot of these stories are pretty old (Raymond has been telling them for a while) but it’s always nice to see them brought to more people
@@JollyGiant19 precisely. It's not like Microsoft doesn't have cool stories to tell. And we do need the true heroes, engineers, to be more public. Most of the time you see the various hangers-on and intermediaries - "program managers", directors, marketing people, VPs. Those folks are just boring AF to me, and all you ever hear from them is corporate speak.
You honestly think msft needs PR lmao they’re fine without it
30 years at Microsoft and never met the big man himself Bill ? I assumed he was going to say, him and Bill are great friends, play golf together, etc... I love Raymond's energy and personality. Very happy, zany and funny! His ability to recall all the facts is incredible! Incredibly knowledgeable. Great listening to this.
Dave, these interviews are fantastic. I like these "long versions" much better than the multiple "short clips."
I guess the short clips are more like some sort of teasers. You can skip them and wait for the full version.
@@hevad I bet it takes a long time to edit those interviews, lots of hours of footage.
So the short clips entice us while we wait.
The only thing that is missing in the long version are chapters. Each question should be one chapter. YT provides a function for that.
Raymond Chen is a fucking legend. I absolutely loved this interview. He is so down to earth and funny!
Raymond comes across as such a cool and relatable guy. The still photos give the impression he would be some awkward nerd, this interview makes me wish I could have a beer with him and listen to more stories.
Buy a copy of ‘The Old New Thing’ - the next best thing :)
I wish we had the old new thing about windows 7 things, but thats too recent
Most of us nerds are cool, relatable guys. 😉 That doesn't mean we're not awkward nerds!
I've been following Dave's Garage for a couple of years now. I'm so impressed with these new interviews. The channel has gone from "I'm the guy who wrote Task Manager" to being the one source on the Internet featuring interviews with Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen. Really incredible work.
"What was the USB Cart of Death and how many people died?" Strong, strong start.
Please continue with these awesome guests. I didn't know any of them before, but it is really important to learn from the giants who came before and whose shoulders we stand on. I've learned a lot and gained a tremendous amount of respect for the guests you've had on, and for you too Dave. Thank you!
Raymond chen the man, the myth, the legend 🙏🏻
what makes windows 95 run faster a modern computer system seriously🤣🤣🤣
Dave, your programming skills may be impressive, but your interviewing prowess truly sets you apart! In a time when brief, concise TikToks dominate, you revive the art of detailed, hour-long dialogues. You create a space for your guests to share their narratives freely. Your thorough research and insightful questions elicit lengthy and incredibly engaging answers. I also love your selection of guests. Keep up the great work!
"... concise TikToks..." made me lol. A lot of adjectives come to mind when I think of TikTok posts but none of them are so generous. 😅
What a lovely chap. I am flabbergasted that you can spend your entire professional life at Microsoft and not meet Bill. That is a real shame.
I was there for a year and a half, and I met Bill Gates at the door of the restrooms; he was going in as I was leaving the restrooms. All I could bring myself to say was "Uuuh, Amm.. excuse me", and scurried away.
The way those corporations seem to operate when they get that big is almost as if you worked for a smaller company and the BillG team is basically the government, an entire separate thing.
I'm amazed he's never met Dave Cutler.
@@monad_tcp Politics! There is a nice interview with Servan Keondjian, lead architect of Direct3D, about that topic.
Dave - this is a great interview. I am really enjoying your content and the history of Microsoft. :)
Glad you enjoy it!
@@DavesGarage
- How to ruin a great interview?
- Make a yellowest clickbait title ever for it.
@@DavesGarage Without Microsoft, and a lot of the work you guys put in to everything, it is likely the world of the sorts of computing as we know today wouldn't exist.
Possibly my life might have gone differently as well, having lived almost my entire lifespan in the era of Windows PCs (though, my span of existence began during the MS-DOS era).
Granted, ID Software played a role as well, as me back in elementary school tried without much success to understand the Doom source. But, it helped with learning C.
Linux was also a thing as well, but never really managed to achieve the same level of general polish and usability as Windows (and that, for the most part, everything "just works"), ...
I sometimes faced annoyances with Windows, like that Win16 programs don't work natively on x64 (or that there is seemingly no real good modern equivalent of BitEdit and PalEdit for working with low-res indexed-color graphics), but can give credit that a lot of other decades' old binaries continue to work at all (this is more than can be said of pretty much any of the other OS's around).
Dave PLEASE do more of these interviews.
Thank you, Dave, for another cool interview, and thank you Raymond for TweakUI - as a support person myself back in those days, it had helped me more than I can count.
"You're probably not going to be playing pinball on the server in your data center." You're right, Since the loss of pinball we had to move to Unreal Tournament.
Thank you so much! I read Raymond's blog every day, happy to see him here!
Awesome interview. Having been a computer geek back into the 8 bit days and learning Z-80 assembler on my TRS-80 (before it was called the Model 1), this was a great combination of "I remember that!" and "So that's what happened!". I absolutely love the war stories!
I loved TweakUI. Very robust program to make windows work and look so much easier and nicer
After installing Win98Se and after installing NIC drivers I'd always go out and download TweakUI.
Wait I'd probably turn off every OS sound possible. Microsoft really leaned hard on annoying sounds to bring your attention to something semi-important.
Sorry for the tangent
I can't live without the modern alternative Windows Aero Tweaker or something
One thing that really passed me off about Windows back in the day it had to make a sound for every little thing which was beyond annoying. Especially that original critical stop sound. This is coming from the perspective of someone starting with a Commodore 64.
I read The Old New Thing cover to cover. Fascinating stuff. Some of the topics covered here are also covered in the book, for those curious. I'm glad you two have taken a moment to talk about old Microsoft.
Been looking for the full interview!
I just realized your shelf in the back are shutters with a piece of wood going through it. I like that alot
I feel like I could listen to this guy forever. Really enjoyed every bit of this!
I'm loving these interviews. All the juicy details and in a really palatable format. Well done, Dave.
The fact that Windows 9x was basically a hypervisor running MS-DOS and Windows still blows my mind.
Hi Dave, that was a great interview. Please plan more of these. I started back in the late 80's with IBM and MS-Dosand was able to purchase a Tandy 1000 and added a 5MB hard drive. Wow, those were great days. I loved programming in Turbo Pascal for school projectsand I actually found a way to edit the company name that was displayed when Dos started. See you next time.
More to come!
@@DavesGarage One with "the man" himself perhaps? Bill Gates?
@@DavesGaragecould you please make an interview with Mark Zbikowski? Just please don't do the clickbait headlines for the video 😁
I'm very thankful for the Raymond Chen's interview (as well as Dave Catler's interview too). I really enjoyed both. More great content such like this, please :)
Thank you for bringing interviews like this to us. I grew up on win311/95 and the work you guys put in to that product inspired me to pursuit a career in software development. I was, and still is, an avid reader of Raymond’s blog and old MS trivia like this brings me much joy. I guess what I’m trying to say is; please do more interviews! ❤
Raymond Chen has answered countless questions I had and even more, I didn't even know I had. I have much gratitude for that. He is a living legend.
Is it just me ir does the video muts for a bit at 1:46:42?
When I went for my interview with Microsoft I had a tie on. The recruitment agent said loose the tie before I met with the Microsoft guys. On my first day I rocked up with no tie but I had leather shoes, slacks and a button up long sleeved shirt on. I walked up to reception and asked for my dev lead. Out rolls this guy in camo shorts and crocs.
Really enjoyed the clips you've posted from this over the last few days. Hopefully listen to the full thing soon
So. If i want pinball to run at 240hz on my gaming monitor, i now know who to blame for that not working.
Love these interviews Dave, this stuff is literal gold for people who find the details of our tools/OS's as a sort of black magic. It's amazing to hear from the people who were there on the floor. There's not anything else like this.
windows at 1000 fps makes no sense cause windows cannot run fast enough for that to seriously matter🤣🤣🤣
The question I'd ask these guys, how come back in the day I could run a copy of Windows on 16MB of RAM and play all my favorite games, and why today it requires gigabytes of memory to run Windows (or any software, really), when all I want is to play all the same old games (right after finishing Dave's video on UA-cam)? I really appreciate frugal memory utilization. From the user's perspective the summary of the task didn't scale with the memory usage.
The question is very easy to answer, there are essentially 3 reasons:
1. Modern programs integrate dozens of libraries to use one or another feature. This saves developer time and reduces development costs but increases memory requirement.
2. Nowadays you usually no longer program in assembler, but in high-level languages. However, high-level languages can only cover a subset of a CPU's assembler instruction set and the functions they offer must be generically suitable for a wide variety of tasks, which is why the compiler creates much more machine code. A simple example is the printf function for text output, which is very flexible, but this flexibility costs a little more memory space. Another example is that high-level languages use entire bytes to store Boolean values (True and False). From a high-level language perspective, this is easier to process. In Assembler, however, you could accommodate 8 Boolean values in one byte and the evaluation of these was quite easy to implement in Assembler, depending on the architecture. 1 byte can store 8 bits.
3. The same high-level language code can usually be compiled in two ways, either in a way that saves memory space and makes the binary code slower or in a way that optimizes the binary code for performance, but this then costs memory space. These days you can get a lot of RAM (e.g. .16 GiB) thrown at you for very little money, but the time it takes for the CPU to complete a task is still precious. That's why nowadays software is optimized towards performance first. Additionally, modern CPUs consist of a multi-stage pipeline with branch prediction. So instead of having to flush the entire pipeline because of a conditional statement, it makes more sense to use branchless programming. The latter requires much more memory, but it is much faster on modern CPUs because the pipeline no longer needs to be flushed, which would be expensive.
And then something very important. RAM that lies idle and is not used is a waste of resources. So there is a reason to really use this available RAM.
I would really love for you to get Larry Osterman, Mark Russinovich, and many other like them on the channel as well. Maybe Bill Gates even! Hell, get all the MS old timers on the channel :D
Oh yeah Mark russinovich used to be so great for this kind of stuff with his blog and books... before he got dragged into all the cloud stuff
Second for russinovich.
Jeffery Snover!! PowerShell is one of the most impactful "inventions" and a true world wonder.
But no matter who is next, it will surely be great.
+1 on Mark Russinovich.
I'm thinking maybe Kraig Brockschmidt, but I'm not sure about that one. 🤔
Gabe Newell
I worked as a Tech Director at Electronics Arts during the Win 3.11 - Win95 transition. We ported a series of Sesame Street games that ran on DOS to work in Windows. DOS games from that era had to support multiple third-party mouse and sound drivers, it got pretty messy. To port these games, we loaded them into a Win 3.11 virtual DOS box, blanked out the Windows desktop, hooked into Windows' mouse and sound drivers, and blasted the graphics directly to the screen buffer. It worked great, especially leaving the mouse and sound driver support to Microsoft.
When we got the word on Win95, everyone was dreading having to go back and debug those DOS games we ported to Win 3.11. I still remember opening the overnight box with that black Win95 upgrade disc, and booting it up on my 286 test machine. It started up like business as usual, no hint of what might be lurking below the surface. It took a while to run our generic compatibility tests before I finally stuck a Win 3.1 Sesame Street game in the CD-ROM drive. The screen went black and it sat there a while with the disc spinning. Then the screen lit up and the Sesame Street theme song played through the speakers. I couldn't believe it. It just. fucking. worked.
Raymond - back in the day I (like many other people) got started with Windows development using the Charles Petzold book(s). What do you think about the idea of creating a 21st century version of those books, so that today's generation of Win32 devs get the appropriate guidance? I've had a look, but honestly, it's so fractured now that it's tough to know what is canon.
I had that book but not the level of understanding of it that he has
I which someone did that with all the new APIs added since Windows Vista
@@monad_tcp Well, there is the 7th edition which is supposed to cover the new APIs. For me that was the reason to buy the 6th edition on the used market.
This was a great interview. Just as good as Dave Cutler.
Happy thanksgiving, thank you for doing these, very well done!
Glad to see it in full form now, I much prefer to watch the entire thing. Raymond is a great guest and you did an excellent job interviewing him.
Great interview! Thanks so much! Topics discussed bring back lots of memories.
I think you should've left more of your (and that other guy's) reactions and remarks to Raymond's jokes and not cut them out. Even the chuckles and "yeah-s" over his words would've been fine and made the the interview even more lively!
Love your channel so much! So inspiring!
I remember well when long file names became a problem when it was used in a file path, the path length exceeded the allotted space for the path. Intuit was the best known offender.
Superb Dave, more please. I was astonished at the work arounds done in W95 to get DOS games to run. Fascinating.
28:50 Poland here 👋🇵🇱
Windows 95 (or 98) is older than me, but there still was one computer with that system in my school. 😊
Thanks for sharing such an enjoyable interview, and thanks to Raymond for sharing his thoughts and recollections!
HOLY HELL? RAYMOND WROTE TWEAK UI!? This guy is a legend!
The two hours flew by! Thanks for arranging these, they are really interesting!
Thanks Dave and Raymond, this was a great interview. I've got to look for Raymond's book, he seems like a great storyteller.
Thanks for bringing some of these insider stories--I really enjoy and appreciate it!
I’m loving the interviews. Please keep’em coming!!
Fascinating interview! Thank you Raymond & Dave!
These videos are awesome, Dave! Really cool seeing you interview Raymond!
This is pure GOOOLD. Thank you Dave and Raymond.
The most interesting (surprising) thing about this interview was that Raymond has never met Dave Cutler. How is that possible?
Knowing how large companies like this operate (and programmers in general), it's really not all that surprising.
"Cart of death" should be a term for such test cases where you compose a use case which is as complex as possible and yet easy to run in the same time.
It was wonderful to hear someone talk about technical issues as though they were simple everyday issues
PowerToys was a godsend to power users everywhere! Having switched to litestep in the Win98 years on my home rig, power toys were the only thing that could get me close to comfortable when I was working in explorer on other machines. Fancy Zones is still making PowerToys proud today 👍Thanks Mr. Chen, for all your hard work!
Thank you Dave. Raymond has been longtime hero to me. I cant tell you how much I enjoyed your interview.
It felt like pre-recorded questions and answers. I wish you could have more live conversations.
On the other hand, I did enjoy the replies and would like to hear more! It was very informative. You are the legends, guys!
Thanks for this interview!
Great video... Reminds me of my own (fond memories, frustrations) experiences.
Press "Any Key" was solved by writing "Any" on a piece of tape and sticking it to their Shift Key.
Excellent !!! Thanks, Dave. Keep 'em coming. 😀
Thank You Raymond and Thank You Dave. Very educational and brought back many memories.
Loved this interview, it was great to hear all the stories :)
Wonderful interview, please do more!
This was very entertaining and educational. Thank you so much for this.
OMG more please! Thanks for the content
unbelievable that Raymond has never met Gates or Cutler! I recall reading Raymond helping people in the windows programming newsgroups on USENET back in 92. Raymond's book 'old new thing' is superb, and he still manages to find time to blog incredibly interesting posts every single day !
Awesome interview! Would love more like this!
Raymond Chen writes the best articles on Windows hands down! Lovely interview thank you both.
Not a Windows user at all, but I think everyone even outside the microsoft world agrees that Raymond Chen is a legend. Hands down one of the best (and ocassionally funniest) blogs on the internet.
Fantastic interview, really enjoy hearing what life was like building the OS's that had such a large impact on my life
Hi Dave, I've been watching your videos for a while and I want to let you know this interview is the coolest thing on your channel. I would love to see you put your interview and conversational skills into more content like this! Keep it up, this is excellent!!!
The nitty gritty details about low-level stuff are great. That closing bit about interrupt handling for MS-DOS apps...!
@@kimp_ossible I completely agree!
This is amazing! Do more interviews!
Like all of the commenters - I've so enjoyed the interviews with Raymond and Dave - - I really like how you stay out of the way of your guests Dave, so refreshing to become engaged by your guest without the usual interruptions which, imo, tends to be the norm with many typical interviewers - thanks for bringing each of these giants to your channel, but an extra thanks for your interviewing style - I appreciate all of your work and I think these interviews have been an exceptional addition.
Yes, please bring more interviews!
These interviews are awesome Dave
These are amazing. I hope you keep doing them for sure. I don't mind if they even lasted longer, these people have so much important history to let the rest of the world know about.
Love the nerdy details, keep 'em coming 👍
1:02:45 that mouse spotlight feature is a handy one for sure! Enjoying power toys myself for resizing images. I want to get into fancy zones.
Very good interview, pls keep bring this king of interview.
Vielen Dank für den Mausfinder und großartiges Interview! 🤗🤗👍👍
Thank you for the mouse finder and great interview!
These interviews have been amazing
Absolutely fantastic interview! Same as with cutler
Hi Dave thanks for the insightful videos.
1:18:04 the story wasn't long enough. You guys are two very smart, educated people that everyone can look up to for inspiration. I have never been so into a YT videos, as much as I have been after subscribing to Dave's channel. I can pick your brain apart about how parts of Windows are made and the background processes that are happening, and I wouldn't get bored a single bit. Dave and Raymond, good job! Keep up the fantastic work both of you do.
"What part of this job keeps you coming back?"
"The health insurance."
Feel that.
This was very enjoyable to listen too. Thank you!
This was absolutely amazing, thank you for making this, I loved it ❤❤❤❤
I also shared it with half a dozen telegram channels and anybody that I felt would be interested
What a great guy and a great interview, it was a pleasure watching it 👍👍
Thank you both. Some good memories from those days. 4dos the memories..
Really interesting and entertaining interview. I would like to hear more content of this kind.
The Find my mouse function from the Power Toys is the one I need the most, thank you for this, I have a 3 screens setup at home and work. It saved me a lot of time!
Thank you Mr. Chen for your stories.
What a dude! What an interview!
Amazing personality. Some people you can just instantly tell the lights are on and he's got a rich inner life and probably spends time alone thinking deeply in conversation with himself. I love him. Would love to be his friend!
Data (and programs) obeys Hooke's gas law, it will expand to fill all the space available. It doesnt matter how much physical memory or storage capacity you have, IT WILL ALL GET USED. The same is true of computing capacity. It doesnt matter if you have a 128 core EPIC cpu, it will eventually get bogged down because lazy coders will forget to write efficient code.
Love these interviews, the end seemed a bit premature though?
Raymond is the man. Great interview, thanks DavePl 👍🤘