@@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.
@@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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
@@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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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! ❤
"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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
00:00 🕵 Raymond Chen recounts receiving a death threat due to a misunderstood functionality in the xcopy program. 01:39 🪄 The "special edition" of Windows 95 was merely about the box, not the contents. The racing stripes didn't enhance the system's speed. 02:07 🕹 The absence of 64-bit Pinball in Windows stemmed from technical challenges during the 64-bit Windows project. Collision detection issues led to its exclusion. 03:15 🖥 The 64-bit Windows project initially targeted Itanium processors, but practical issues arose during porting Pinball to 64-bit code. 04:46 🧰 During the 64-bit Windows project, resolving Pinball's collision detection problem was sidelined due to time constraints in porting other files. 06:00 🎮 Pinball's removal from the 64-bit Windows aimed to match the target audience (high-end servers) and avoid distraction from server-related tasks. 07:23 🤔 The fix for Pinball might have involved a floating point rounding issue that affected collision detection on 64-bit processors like Alpha. 08:47 🖥 Testing for Pinball's collision detection problem primarily occurred on Alpha processors, as physical Itanium hardware wasn't available during that phase. 11:05 💼 Raymond once received a death threat due to a misunderstood functionality in the xcopy program. 12:30 🎓 Raymond joined Microsoft after applying for graduate school, landing a summer internship in '89, and later working on OS/2 emulation and printing projects. 16:07 👔 Raymond's consistent jacket and tie attire at Microsoft started as a result of his high school's dress code, which later became a known characteristic among colleagues. 18:52 🤝 Raymond leverages his extensive network at Microsoft to seek advice or help across various domains, owing to his tenure and connections in the company. 19:31 🐝 The term "hive" in the Windows registry was playfully introduced by a developer to tease a colleague who disliked bees, incorporating bee-related terms into the registry code. 21:06 🖱 Users sometimes tend to avoid answering dialogues they find confusing or unnecessary, leading to a reluctance to engage with system updates, as observed during Windows support sessions. 23:06 🌍 Windows 95 faced challenges with its time zone map due to geopolitical disputes, as it used United Nations maps which didn't align with all countries' views on boundaries. 27:33 🗺 To mitigate conflicts over territory visibility in the time zone map, Windows rotated the map to center time zones without highlighting any area. 30:35 🖥 Taskbar grouping is complex due to varying criteria like identifying program relationships and user perception, requiring clear rules for grouping and separating applications. 34:29 🍫 Designing intuitive vending machine interfaces involves avoiding item codes that match prices, preventing users from accidentally selecting items based on prices instead of item codes. 36:49 🧸 Windows team had mascots like "Bear," "Bunny," and "Piglet," with each representing different eras and versions of the operating system, influencing internal function names. 42:14 ⚠ The "USB Cart of Death" was a cart loaded with multiple USB devices used for testing USB functionality, often causing system crashes due to early USB code's instability. 46:11 🖥 When porting from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows, unexpected data hiding places emerged, causing crashes due to misused storage. 50:31 📝 A mention of NTFS compression in a blog post led to an angry email from Dave Cutler, a rare interaction most try to avoid. 52:06 🚪 Bill Gates once casually toured the team, leading to a memorable demo mishap when he accidentally sat on a colleague's notes. 53:01 🧰 Windows Power Toys were born during the idle time after Windows 95 RTM, crafted as fun little programs by the development team. 56:12 🛠 Tweaking Windows with 'Tweak UI' added settings not present in the control panel, but its removal from CDs followed dueto users wreaking havoc with system settings. 59:37 📦 Microsoft's policy shift against offering unsupported downloads led to the demise of Windows Power Toys, but they've resurfaced as an open-source project by Clint Rutkas and others. 01:03:49 📦 The innovative approach to Windows 95 compatibility testing involved buying one copy of every PC software from Egghead for the team to test and adopt for debugging. 01:07:32 🎮 A dive into game compatibility revealed quirky bugs, like a Wing Commander issue tied to the cloaking device hotkey conflicting with DOS emulation's paste function. 01:10:16 🕹 Raise conditions in multitasking OSs can lead to apps encountering speed discrepancies, causing issues like sequences being too fast or too slow for app detection. 01:12:21 🎮 Raymond Chen fixed Windows Pinball's CPU usage issue by adding a frame rate limiter, reducing CPU usage dramatically, a simple fix for a satisfying result. 01:14:31 🛠 The time travel debugger, recording and replaying program execution, significantly streamlines debugging, allowing developers to trace back steps instantly without restarting the program. 01:18:23 🎨 Color-coding files (blue for compressed, green for encrypted) was a past feature in Windows UI but posed accessibility issues for color-blind users. 01:20:49 😠 Usability studies observing users struggle with simple tasks often elicited frustration, rage, and sadness, likened to watching a game show where you know the answers, but contestants struggle. 01:23:19 💻 Windows 286 and 386 operated with multiple virtual machines, including a 32-bit OS (Windows 386), a copy of 16-bit Windows, and MS-DOS, functioning concurrently. 01:25:07 📁 Long file names stored in Unicode, though initially questioned for space use, proved crucial for compatibility, preventing issues with file systems and alignment on different processors. 01:28:33 🔄 Misaligned data in processors like RISC led to significant performance issues; attempts to load misaligned memory caused varying degrees of complexity and faults. 01:31:52 ⌨ Splitting a PC intotwo workstations without virtual machines or separate input queues isn't feasible due to the single input queue handling all inputs in the input system. 01:32:44 🎮 Game developers thanked Raymond Chen for getting their games to work on Windows 95 but joked about the toll it took on his sanity. 01:34:59 🎟 Raymond Chen had an unused VIP ticket to the Windows 95 launch but gave it away; his colleague returned the ticket because it felt right to be with the team. 01:36:08 🔍 Colleagues on the Windows NT printing team crafted forgeries of Windows 95 launch tickets to access various parts of the event. 01:38:27 ☕ Microsoft employees brought a coffee maker to IBM's office, labeled it "Microsoft confidential," preventing security violations. 01:43:17 🚗 Steve Ballmer left his rental car at an IBM parking lot, leading toconfusion about a "hardworking employee" that turned out to be the abandoned car. 01:45:23 🗝 Raymond Chen once lost his rental car keys on the beach, leading to AMX arranging a tow truck for the car and a van to pick up his family. 01:46:30 ⌨ Raymond's early hacking and reverse engineering skills developed on the Apple II, allowing him to reverse engineer a hard drive driver to work with an unsupported OS. 01:51:49 💼 Raymond's transition from mathematics to software engineering was driven by enjoyment and finding fulfillment in software development. 01:52:48 📚 Raymond's father was a mechanical engineering professor, teaching heat transfer and often helping him grade engineering exams. 01:56:02 📝 Raymond Chen talks about decluttering his cables, keeping only what he needs and relying on admin for additional resources like HDMI cables. 01:56:57 📰 Chen maintains a six-month content buffer for his blog, striving to increase it to minimize anxiety about content creation. 01:58:18 🖥 Windows 95 debugging involved handling programs that allocated excessive memory, filling up hard drives due to reliance on virtual memory. 02:00:21 🔧 Compatibility challenges for Win95 included issues with DOS extenders assuming control, leading to conflicts in interacting with Windows. 02:03:04 🛠 Debugging strategy involved trapping and correcting code that disabled interrupts, leading to system hangs when running under Windows 95's virtualized mode.
@@DavesGarage sure Dave. here it is, in 2,501 chars. keep up the good work. a minor suggestion: have someone cut up every question, and publish them as separate videos. myself i love the long form interviews, but there are many who enjoy the shorter pieces. 00:00 🕹 Windows Pinball's omission in 64-bit Windows was due to Itanium porting priorities and collision issues. 06:00 💻 Pinball's removal from 64-bit Windows targeted high-end servers where gaming wasn't a priority; its beta return surprised Raymond Chen. 11:05 ⚔ Raymond Chen faced a death threat concerning the XCopy program but was relieved as the threatening person wasn't aware of the switch in XCopy. 14:03 🎓 Raymond's journey to Microsoft began with an unexpected interview in college, shifting from grad school plans to a Microsoft internship. 16:20 👔 Known for office attire, Raymond's prank led to a "no jacket and tie" challenge that became a fundraiser. 22:27 🖥 Design tip: Clear dialogue boxes prevent user dismissals, ensuring informed choices. 23:33 🌍 Windows 95's time zone map glitched due to geopolitical disputes. 30:35 📊 Taskbar grouping complexities involved recognizing various app types for grouping. 34:29 🍫 Vending machine design tip: Differentiate item codes from prices to prevent inadvertent purchases. 40:25 🧸 Windows mascots like Bear, Bunny, and Piglet were used in internal functions, representing different Windows teams. 45:17 🖥 Debugging using the "Card of Death" revealed USB issues aiding in future crash fixes. 47:06 🤔 Porting challenges to 64-bit Windows revealed data placement complexities. 52:49 💻 Anecdote involving Bill Gates highlighted the need for preparedness in demos. 55:05 🛠 Power Toys emerged from surplus time post-Windows 95, offering extra settings. 01:08:30 🐛 Debugging sometimes involves conflicting hotkeys or processes, impacting system performance. 01:12:21 🎮 Raymond's proud moment: Fixing Pinball in Windows 95 by reducing CPU usage. 01:14:31 ⏰ Time Travel Debugger aids in debugging without resets. 01:18:23 🎨 Color coding files posed accessibility issues, emphasizing non-color indicators. 01:20:24 😠😢 Usability tests induced frustration, highlighting UI/UX design challenges. 01:53:15 📚 Interviewers tested understanding beyond formulas, uncovering student challenges. 01:55:07 🤔 Estimating data involved testing reasoning more than final numerical answers. 01:56:57 📝 Maintaining a content buffer reduced blog anxiety, offering writing flexibility. 01:58:18 🖥 Windows 95 faced compatibility issues with unlimited memory assumptions, causing crashes. 02:01:19 🛠 Compatibility challenges with DOS extenders led to interrupts hanging in Windows 95, solved through a clever workaround.
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!
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 !
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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.
@@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.
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!
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.
"I didn't ask for an update. What's this? Go away." I cannot stress enough how much of a lesson this should be for UI developers. Users are not sitting around waiting for their OS to ask them things. They are using the device to _do something._ This is such a dark pattern of product design that didn't exist before everything became a computer, and shouldn't exist now. The other day, I gave my phone permission to do... I don't even know what... because it popped up a question, right over the map with turn-by-turn directions, to get to some place I was trying to go, in traffic, a couple of blocks away. The only button I could even see in the 0.6 seconds of attention I could afford to give it was "Yes, allow ?????" So I guess I'm 24/7 live-streaming to a bus terminal in Quebec now. Or whatever that did.... I cannot even count how many times Teams has decided that it would like to offer me a walkthrough of some feature I really don't care about, right at the start of a meeting, when my main concerns are 1) I'm here!, 2) is my mic on?, and 3) is my camera on?? Like...really? This is the time to pop up a viewport-wide dialog introducing the brand new button with three dots on it that does ... whatever that stupid button does? Yeah, I've got nothing going on, obviously, why don't you give me a tour?? Stop it!
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.
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.
Really nice interview Dave! I got a strong "deja vu" feeling when Raymond described being handed a piece of asm and then figuring out that "this code is getting the max() of two values, without branching". I immediately started to wonder: "Was this signed or unsigned numbers?" Unsigned are a little bit easier of course!
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!
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!!!
2:01:00 - I remember back when I did development in DJGPP, Windows wouldn't crash if you dereferenced a NULL pointer but CWSDPMI would. So if you had a bug it would silently work and you wouldn't find out about it until you restarted into DOS to test it.
This is one of the main reasons why it is better to develop your code cross-platform. Some bugs that exist on both platforms trigger much faster on one platform than on the other and vice versa. Through cross-platform development, such bugs can be found much more quickly and thus save development time.
What a class act, Raymond Chen. I've never seen him in person, but wow he seems like such a great human being. His book is brilliant, highly recommended even if you're not keenly interested in Windows
Who else should Dave interview next? 😉 - Bill G? (of course but he's probably "unreachable") - Jim Allchin? - Steven Sinofsky? - Joe Belfiore? - Terry Myerson?
I’ve been reading Raymond’s blog for a long time. But I didn’t realize how long until I started thinking, hmm, haven’t I heard some of these stories before. I look them up and yes, in 2004! I probably didn’t read them in 2004 myself but wow
I don't wish to be disparaging, but I love Raymond. Such a fun and light-hearted guy. Would love to hear more from him. I get an ulcer listening to crusty old Dave Cutler.
1:57:35 Guy writes a JIT compiler to generate opcodes to execute in milliseconds to come but wants to do his work 6-9 months ahead of time to avoid stress of meeting his personal deadline. Respect.
Loving these interviews, but the biggest standout so far, is YOU ARE ALL-OVERGROWN KIDS. Still juvenile at heart and that's great to see. I'm the biggest kid I know at almost 40!
Great interview! Please please more of these! Perhaps rico m? He's not retired yet (in fact i think he recently rejoined msft!) but I'm sure he has some awesome stories from the vista and earlier days
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!
@@nneeerrrdWhat 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
"What was the USB Cart of Death and how many people died?" Strong, strong start.
Raymond Chen is a fucking legend. I absolutely loved this interview. He is so down to earth and funny!
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.
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.
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. 😅
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).
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.
Dave PLEASE do more of these interviews.
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
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 😁
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.
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.
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!
Thank you so much! I read Raymond's blog every day, happy to see him here!
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.
I feel like I could listen to this guy forever. Really enjoyed every bit of this!
"What part of this job keeps you coming back?"
"The health insurance."
Feel that.
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.
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! ❤
"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.
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.
The fact that Windows 9x was basically a hypervisor running MS-DOS and Windows still blows my mind.
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'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 :)
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🤣🤣🤣
Is it just me ir does the video muts for a bit at 1:46:42?
I'm loving these interviews. All the juicy details and in a really palatable format. Well done, Dave.
28:50 Poland here 👋🇵🇱
Windows 95 (or 98) is older than me, but there still was one computer with that system in my school. 😊
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.
HOLY HELL? RAYMOND WROTE TWEAK UI!? This guy is a legend!
00:00 🕵 Raymond Chen recounts receiving a death threat due to a misunderstood functionality in the xcopy program.
01:39 🪄 The "special edition" of Windows 95 was merely about the box, not the contents. The racing stripes didn't enhance the system's speed.
02:07 🕹 The absence of 64-bit Pinball in Windows stemmed from technical challenges during the 64-bit Windows project. Collision detection issues led to its exclusion.
03:15 🖥 The 64-bit Windows project initially targeted Itanium processors, but practical issues arose during porting Pinball to 64-bit code.
04:46 🧰 During the 64-bit Windows project, resolving Pinball's collision detection problem was sidelined due to time constraints in porting other files.
06:00 🎮 Pinball's removal from the 64-bit Windows aimed to match the target audience (high-end servers) and avoid distraction from server-related tasks.
07:23 🤔 The fix for Pinball might have involved a floating point rounding issue that affected collision detection on 64-bit processors like Alpha.
08:47 🖥 Testing for Pinball's collision detection problem primarily occurred on Alpha processors, as physical Itanium hardware wasn't available during that phase.
11:05 💼 Raymond once received a death threat due to a misunderstood functionality in the xcopy program.
12:30 🎓 Raymond joined Microsoft after applying for graduate school, landing a summer internship in '89, and later working on OS/2 emulation and printing projects.
16:07 👔 Raymond's consistent jacket and tie attire at Microsoft started as a result of his high school's dress code, which later became a known characteristic among colleagues.
18:52 🤝 Raymond leverages his extensive network at Microsoft to seek advice or help across various domains, owing to his tenure and connections in the company.
19:31 🐝 The term "hive" in the Windows registry was playfully introduced by a developer to tease a colleague who disliked bees, incorporating bee-related terms into the registry code.
21:06 🖱 Users sometimes tend to avoid answering dialogues they find confusing or unnecessary, leading to a reluctance to engage with system updates, as observed during Windows support sessions.
23:06 🌍 Windows 95 faced challenges with its time zone map due to geopolitical disputes, as it used United Nations maps which didn't align with all countries' views on boundaries.
27:33 🗺 To mitigate conflicts over territory visibility in the time zone map, Windows rotated the map to center time zones without highlighting any area.
30:35 🖥 Taskbar grouping is complex due to varying criteria like identifying program relationships and user perception, requiring clear rules for grouping and separating applications.
34:29 🍫 Designing intuitive vending machine interfaces involves avoiding item codes that match prices, preventing users from accidentally selecting items based on prices instead of item codes.
36:49 🧸 Windows team had mascots like "Bear," "Bunny," and "Piglet," with each representing different eras and versions of the operating system, influencing internal function names.
42:14 ⚠ The "USB Cart of Death" was a cart loaded with multiple USB devices used for testing USB functionality, often causing system crashes due to early USB code's instability.
46:11 🖥 When porting from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows, unexpected data hiding places emerged, causing crashes due to misused storage.
50:31 📝 A mention of NTFS compression in a blog post led to an angry email from Dave Cutler, a rare interaction most try to avoid.
52:06 🚪 Bill Gates once casually toured the team, leading to a memorable demo mishap when he accidentally sat on a colleague's notes.
53:01 🧰 Windows Power Toys were born during the idle time after Windows 95 RTM, crafted as fun little programs by the development team.
56:12 🛠 Tweaking Windows with 'Tweak UI' added settings not present in the control panel, but its removal from CDs followed dueto users wreaking havoc with system settings.
59:37 📦 Microsoft's policy shift against offering unsupported downloads led to the demise of Windows Power Toys, but they've resurfaced as an open-source project by Clint Rutkas and others.
01:03:49 📦 The innovative approach to Windows 95 compatibility testing involved buying one copy of every PC software from Egghead for the team to test and adopt for debugging.
01:07:32 🎮 A dive into game compatibility revealed quirky bugs, like a Wing Commander issue tied to the cloaking device hotkey conflicting with DOS emulation's paste function.
01:10:16 🕹 Raise conditions in multitasking OSs can lead to apps encountering speed discrepancies, causing issues like sequences being too fast or too slow for app detection.
01:12:21 🎮 Raymond Chen fixed Windows Pinball's CPU usage issue by adding a frame rate limiter, reducing CPU usage dramatically, a simple fix for a satisfying result.
01:14:31 🛠 The time travel debugger, recording and replaying program execution, significantly streamlines debugging, allowing developers to trace back steps instantly without restarting the program.
01:18:23 🎨 Color-coding files (blue for compressed, green for encrypted) was a past feature in Windows UI but posed accessibility issues for color-blind users.
01:20:49 😠 Usability studies observing users struggle with simple tasks often elicited frustration, rage, and sadness, likened to watching a game show where you know the answers, but contestants struggle.
01:23:19 💻 Windows 286 and 386 operated with multiple virtual machines, including a 32-bit OS (Windows 386), a copy of 16-bit Windows, and MS-DOS, functioning concurrently.
01:25:07 📁 Long file names stored in Unicode, though initially questioned for space use, proved crucial for compatibility, preventing issues with file systems and alignment on different processors.
01:28:33 🔄 Misaligned data in processors like RISC led to significant performance issues; attempts to load misaligned memory caused varying degrees of complexity and faults.
01:31:52 ⌨ Splitting a PC intotwo workstations without virtual machines or separate input queues isn't feasible due to the single input queue handling all inputs in the input system.
01:32:44 🎮 Game developers thanked Raymond Chen for getting their games to work on Windows 95 but joked about the toll it took on his sanity.
01:34:59 🎟 Raymond Chen had an unused VIP ticket to the Windows 95 launch but gave it away; his colleague returned the ticket because it felt right to be with the team.
01:36:08 🔍 Colleagues on the Windows NT printing team crafted forgeries of Windows 95 launch tickets to access various parts of the event.
01:38:27 ☕ Microsoft employees brought a coffee maker to IBM's office, labeled it "Microsoft confidential," preventing security violations.
01:43:17 🚗 Steve Ballmer left his rental car at an IBM parking lot, leading toconfusion about a "hardworking employee" that turned out to be the abandoned car.
01:45:23 🗝 Raymond Chen once lost his rental car keys on the beach, leading to AMX arranging a tow truck for the car and a van to pick up his family.
01:46:30 ⌨ Raymond's early hacking and reverse engineering skills developed on the Apple II, allowing him to reverse engineer a hard drive driver to work with an unsupported OS.
01:51:49 💼 Raymond's transition from mathematics to software engineering was driven by enjoyment and finding fulfillment in software development.
01:52:48 📚 Raymond's father was a mechanical engineering professor, teaching heat transfer and often helping him grade engineering exams.
01:56:02 📝 Raymond Chen talks about decluttering his cables, keeping only what he needs and relying on admin for additional resources like HDMI cables.
01:56:57 📰 Chen maintains a six-month content buffer for his blog, striving to increase it to minimize anxiety about content creation.
01:58:18 🖥 Windows 95 debugging involved handling programs that allocated excessive memory, filling up hard drives due to reliance on virtual memory.
02:00:21 🔧 Compatibility challenges for Win95 included issues with DOS extenders assuming control, leading to conflicts in interacting with Windows.
02:03:04 🛠 Debugging strategy involved trapping and correcting code that disabled interrupts, leading to system hangs when running under Windows 95's virtualized mode.
This is great, but I can only add 4000 chars to the description - if you email me a shorter version, I'll add it to the video!
@@DavesGaragejust pin it. Don't be jealous, give the guy credit
It's done by ai tool. That's a bot account promoting that tool.
@@DavesGarage sure Dave. here it is, in 2,501 chars. keep up the good work. a minor suggestion: have someone cut up every question, and publish them as separate videos. myself i love the long form interviews, but there are many who enjoy the shorter pieces.
00:00 🕹 Windows Pinball's omission in 64-bit Windows was due to Itanium porting priorities and collision issues.
06:00 💻 Pinball's removal from 64-bit Windows targeted high-end servers where gaming wasn't a priority; its beta return surprised Raymond Chen.
11:05 ⚔ Raymond Chen faced a death threat concerning the XCopy program but was relieved as the threatening person wasn't aware of the switch in XCopy.
14:03 🎓 Raymond's journey to Microsoft began with an unexpected interview in college, shifting from grad school plans to a Microsoft internship.
16:20 👔 Known for office attire, Raymond's prank led to a "no jacket and tie" challenge that became a fundraiser.
22:27 🖥 Design tip: Clear dialogue boxes prevent user dismissals, ensuring informed choices.
23:33 🌍 Windows 95's time zone map glitched due to geopolitical disputes.
30:35 📊 Taskbar grouping complexities involved recognizing various app types for grouping.
34:29 🍫 Vending machine design tip: Differentiate item codes from prices to prevent inadvertent purchases.
40:25 🧸 Windows mascots like Bear, Bunny, and Piglet were used in internal functions, representing different Windows teams.
45:17 🖥 Debugging using the "Card of Death" revealed USB issues aiding in future crash fixes.
47:06 🤔 Porting challenges to 64-bit Windows revealed data placement complexities.
52:49 💻 Anecdote involving Bill Gates highlighted the need for preparedness in demos.
55:05 🛠 Power Toys emerged from surplus time post-Windows 95, offering extra settings.
01:08:30 🐛 Debugging sometimes involves conflicting hotkeys or processes, impacting system performance.
01:12:21 🎮 Raymond's proud moment: Fixing Pinball in Windows 95 by reducing CPU usage.
01:14:31 ⏰ Time Travel Debugger aids in debugging without resets.
01:18:23 🎨 Color coding files posed accessibility issues, emphasizing non-color indicators.
01:20:24 😠😢 Usability tests induced frustration, highlighting UI/UX design challenges.
01:53:15 📚 Interviewers tested understanding beyond formulas, uncovering student challenges.
01:55:07 🤔 Estimating data involved testing reasoning more than final numerical answers.
01:56:57 📝 Maintaining a content buffer reduced blog anxiety, offering writing flexibility.
01:58:18 🖥 Windows 95 faced compatibility issues with unlimited memory assumptions, causing crashes.
02:01:19 🛠 Compatibility challenges with DOS extenders led to interrupts hanging in Windows 95, solved through a clever workaround.
@@nneeerrrdyou idiot. If he puts it in the description then it makes the chapters on the timeline work.
This was a great interview. Just as good as Dave Cutler.
OMG more please! Thanks for the content
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!
So. If i want pinball to run at 240hz on my gaming monitor, i now know who to blame for that not working.
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.
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 !
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.
"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.
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.
Superb Dave, more please. I was astonished at the work arounds done in W95 to get DOS games to run. Fascinating.
Thanks Dave and Raymond, this was a great interview. I've got to look for Raymond's book, he seems like a great storyteller.
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.
This is pure GOOOLD. Thank you Dave and Raymond.
Really enjoyed the clips you've posted from this over the last few days. Hopefully listen to the full thing soon
Raymond Chen writes the best articles on Windows hands down! Lovely interview thank you both.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
Thank you Dave. Raymond has been longtime hero to me. I cant tell you how much I enjoyed your interview.
28:48 - it's 100% true - Raymond Chen flooded Poland on the map with the Baltic Sea :D Even Windows XP has this bug. Regards from Poland, guys.
The two hours flew by! Thanks for arranging these, they are really interesting!
Thanks for sharing such an enjoyable interview, and thanks to Raymond for sharing his thoughts and recollections!
"I didn't ask for an update. What's this? Go away."
I cannot stress enough how much of a lesson this should be for UI developers. Users are not sitting around waiting for their OS to ask them things. They are using the device to _do something._ This is such a dark pattern of product design that didn't exist before everything became a computer, and shouldn't exist now.
The other day, I gave my phone permission to do... I don't even know what... because it popped up a question, right over the map with turn-by-turn directions, to get to some place I was trying to go, in traffic, a couple of blocks away. The only button I could even see in the 0.6 seconds of attention I could afford to give it was "Yes, allow ?????" So I guess I'm 24/7 live-streaming to a bus terminal in Quebec now. Or whatever that did....
I cannot even count how many times Teams has decided that it would like to offer me a walkthrough of some feature I really don't care about, right at the start of a meeting, when my main concerns are 1) I'm here!, 2) is my mic on?, and 3) is my camera on?? Like...really? This is the time to pop up a viewport-wide dialog introducing the brand new button with three dots on it that does ... whatever that stupid button does? Yeah, I've got nothing going on, obviously, why don't you give me a tour??
Stop it!
Refreshing interview style. Just asks questions, lets him answer for 5 minutes without making a sound. Then asks a new question.
Fascinating interview! Thank you Raymond & Dave!
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.
Finally we know why printers never work. Raymond doesn't work on them!
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.
Vielen Dank für den Mausfinder und großartiges Interview! 🤗🤗👍👍
Thank you for the mouse finder and great interview!
Even tho I only understood half of what he was talking about, I couldn't stop listening to this interview!
About the computer with two video cards/keyboards used by two users: I think this was what Windows MultiPoint Services was about.
Came here to say that :)
I love Raymond Chen. I have been reading his blog posts for years. They are extremely interesting.
The Legend himself! Dave's got some of the most interesting guests on UA-cam. Not to mention him being a legend within itself.
Really nice interview Dave! I got a strong "deja vu" feeling when Raymond described being handed a piece of asm and then figuring out that "this code is getting the max() of two values, without branching". I immediately started to wonder: "Was this signed or unsigned numbers?" Unsigned are a little bit easier of course!
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!
Most of Raymond's answers also exist as blog posts. That's probably why they feel pre-recorded: they have all been written before!
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!
2:01:00 - I remember back when I did development in DJGPP, Windows wouldn't crash if you dereferenced a NULL pointer but CWSDPMI would. So if you had a bug it would silently work and you wouldn't find out about it until you restarted into DOS to test it.
This is one of the main reasons why it is better to develop your code cross-platform. Some bugs that exist on both platforms trigger much faster on one platform than on the other and vice versa. Through cross-platform development, such bugs can be found much more quickly and thus save development time.
@@OpenGL4ever thoroughly agree.
That modern pinball with the old sounds looked amazing. We should petition for Microsoft to make it
These videos are awesome, Dave! Really cool seeing you interview Raymond!
What a class act, Raymond Chen. I've never seen him in person, but wow he seems like such a great human being. His book is brilliant, highly recommended even if you're not keenly interested in Windows
Who else should Dave interview next? 😉
- Bill G? (of course but he's probably "unreachable")
- Jim Allchin?
- Steven Sinofsky?
- Joe Belfiore?
- Terry Myerson?
Gabe Newell
Tweak UI was one of my favorite power toys back in the day. I had no idea Raymond was responsible for it.
Thank You Raymond and Thank You Dave. Very educational and brought back many memories.
Thanks for bringing some of these insider stories--I really enjoy and appreciate it!
I’ve been reading Raymond’s blog for a long time. But I didn’t realize how long until I started thinking, hmm, haven’t I heard some of these stories before. I look them up and yes, in 2004! I probably didn’t read them in 2004 myself but wow
I don't wish to be disparaging, but I love Raymond. Such a fun and light-hearted guy. Would love to hear more from him. I get an ulcer listening to crusty old Dave Cutler.
I'm only a quarter of the way through and this is great! I think Larry Osterman and Anders Hejlsberg would also be interesting interviews.
Love these interviews, the end seemed a bit premature though?
Really interesting and entertaining interview. I would like to hear more content of this kind.
Such a masterclass from M. Chen. What a legend
1:57:35 Guy writes a JIT compiler to generate opcodes to execute in milliseconds to come but wants to do his work 6-9 months ahead of time to avoid stress of meeting his personal deadline. Respect.
Fantastic interview, really enjoy hearing what life was like building the OS's that had such a large impact on my life
Loving these interviews, but the biggest standout so far, is YOU ARE ALL-OVERGROWN KIDS. Still juvenile at heart and that's great to see. I'm the biggest kid I know at almost 40!
Great interview! Please please more of these! Perhaps rico m? He's not retired yet (in fact i think he recently rejoined msft!) but I'm sure he has some awesome stories from the vista and earlier days
Such a short podcast could listen for years
I really enjoyed this, kept me occupied on a transatlantic flight just before Christmas.