It's interesting, but there's more to the story that he's not telling. For example, Phil Katz wrote the original PKARC program in the DOS days as a compression module when BBSes were everywhere. This was followed by a bit of controversy over who owned the rights to the compression algorithm, so Katz wrote a new algorithm called PKZIP. There's some who claim that Microsoft stole ARC from Katz, which is why he wrote ZIP and Katz's name fell into obscurity. Regardless who's side you take, Dave should have at least mentioned Katz and given Katz at least some of the credit instead of making it seem like he wrote ZIP.
@@fredashay Wrong, there's already ZIP file program implementations others than PKZIP back in early 90's like open-sourced Info-ZIP. Sure he's not invented ZIP file, but it is not impossible to anyone to write ZIP parser as Dave claimed, since Phill Katz's PKWARE have published ZIP file specification in early day. Also can you give evidence if Microsoft stole Katz's code as you claimed? The only information is the ARC author (Thom Henderson) is the one who accused PK, not Microsoft. Then if you don't have enough strong evidence, don't spread lie by misinformation. What a irony...
@@fredashay What? Dude are you okay typing that not on high? 😂🤣 Just because you can search on google doesn't mean you right. In the fact after I researching again on google as you said, I didn't find your claim. May you misunderstand history but Microsoft even never involved on ARC/ZIP feud, in the fact it's feud between ARC author & Phil Katz. Or may you got "trust me" source and you just blatantly agree? You even said Dave is lie and can't provide any source of claim how he lied. Sorry, I'm not defend Microsoft, since I have rather than use Linux distros and free alternative for now, I just debunk your nonsense claim. I don't feed trolls like you and I'm sure others readers won't agree for you at all
@@fredashay He didn't say that he wrote ZIP. He said he wrote a ZIP-file parser (indicating that ZIP compression already existed) that eventually became his shareware program Visual ZIP. And that was later incorporated into Windows.
@@fredashay Did you even watch the video? He didn't take all the credit. He didn't talk about Phil Katz or PKZip because it was irrelevant to what he was talking about.
Problem is that the Coca Cola doesn't need to explain itself to anyone beyond shareholders; it a secret recipe meant for business. Open source and Linux are more like a cookbook.
For those that are curious about the green window: the windows behind me are powered by NightDriverLED.com and for some reason the green window kept losing WiFi and I couldn't tell until edited because it was all behind me... so I added the "No WiFi" logo when the window quits :-)
Now that I am going back and watching it, and seeing the logo pop on and off as Dave is calmly talking through his video is quite entertaining. The subtle humor is great. What was with the green box though? I understand glen cant read it but there must be a backstory.
It was possible to change "START" to "STOP" or any other string 5 characters or less. The string is stored in explorer.exe which could be modified using a hex editor for instance. You had to copy explorer, rename it, edit it, delete the original and save the modified copy as explorer.exe. Upon reboot i was the coolest kid in 7th grade!
Cooler still were the win95 days (I think iut was fixed in 98+) where if you put the keyboard focus on the Start button (I think you had to dismiss the menu), and then did alt+space, it gave you the system menu that you'd usually expect from regular windows. Now, you might think that if you hit 'close' you closed the shell.. and you'd be wrong. All it would accomplish was that your start button would entirely disappear from the taskbar. It was a very fun way to troll friends back in the day.
@@seremptos my memory is that the string was 5 characters long so you had to fill the unused characters with spaces if the word you were replacing START with had less than 5 characters. I believe if you added more than 5 characters the checksum of explorer.exe would be wrong and the program would not execute. Edit- Everyone is saying that the checksum would change with any edit and that sounds right. All I know is that if you changed the file too much it would not run.
I remember doing a hexedit on explorer and I did it wrong and explorer would no longer work. That is when I learned that you could run a program from task manager
Being a teenager around the 95/NT era, I remember looking at NT3 and NT4 with excitement and awe. I would read magazines and articles about these powerful operating systems, imagining running them on my computer and using their tools. Operating Systems were exciting in a way they seldom are (if not entirely aren't) anymore.
I used NT to run my BBS (PCBoard) with 2 nodes because Win95 failed miserably regarding multitasking/background process resource management. Used Win95-98SE only for gaming/multimedia. Was pretty happy when XP came around covering both worlds.
I really got into computers around the time Windows 98 was around but had access to plenty of machines that were way too old and slow to run 98 or 95 in any usable way, so I got knee-deep into DOS and Windows 3.1 territory trying to make these old machines somewhat usable. My neighbour gave me a big pile of late-80s DOS magazines that were quite helpful trying to mess with old hardware, one of them contained a massive table with config data for hundreds of MFM hard drive models. Some manufacturers, like Seagate, migrated even their oldest data to the internet and made it available free of charge by the late 90s but for some more obscure models you had to rely on paper data from back in the day. At school we had IBM PS/VP 486 DX2/66 machines with a stunning 8 MB of RAM and 250 MB hard drives that were completely overwhelmed by Win 95 and Office 97 so - with the admin's consent - I downgraded ours to DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 running Word 6.0. Together with a free Epson dot matrix printer and a bunch of DOS games it was quite useful well into the early 2000s. I'm surprised we never got any noise complaints about that printer, our classroom was on the third floor and you could hear the printer by the front door on the ground floor, even with the classroom door closed.
I loved the computer magazines back then - and the Best Buy ads! We got a decent computer in 1997 - I was in my mid teens. Got it at Sam’s Club 😆. I’ve been a UI designer for over 20 years - it all started with MS Paint on my friend’s computer several years before my family got one.
I used to do the same thing. Windows was exciting around that era. I remember dreaming of having a computer of my own that could run Windows 95, as I still had a hand-me-down running 3.1 at that time. I'd say the excitement continued into the XP era. I think Vista's failure not only ended hype for Windows releases but made people dread them. I think in terms of usability and stability, 7 was as good as it gets on the desktop.
@@bchristian85 Same here! I also dreamed of having my own computer. I also looked forward Comp USA, and Circuit City ads in the Sunday newspaper. Today I still open up the Microcenter emails even though I don’t need anything. 😆 I eventually built a computer to call my own which I needed for design school circa 2000. A little later I got a Toshiba laptop which I also loved dearly - I was inspired by Eric Jordan’s laptop (founder of 2advanced studios a popular web design company) which was a Toshiba. XP was my fav windows OS and I used it for a long time until switching to Mac for my main computer. Been using Macs mainly since 2007. In 2016 I built a beastly PC for special 3D rendering work. It’s a dual Xeon 20 core machine with four Evga GTX 1070 FTW Hybrid water cooled GPUs. It’s a pretty exotic machine and weighs about 50lbs. It runs on a ASUS workstation motherboard with error correcting server class RAM. 64GB of RAM in that PC, my Mac has 72GB of RAM. I’m happy to have been a part of the early mainstream days of the internet, it was an exciting time and very different from today! 😍 Cheers! 🍻
Thanks for the trip down memory lane Dave. I worked in building 17 for three years, having been transferred from Charlotte, NC to Seattle to work on the AnswerWizard(clippy). I was there from '94--98. I had forgotten about SLM until you mentioned it. I still remember going through one of the buildings and seeing all the versions of alternatives to Clippy that the animators had made for all the other languages of MS Office. The dolphin and secretary from the Japanese version always come to mind. And the different easter eggs for the Word and Excel versions were fun. I remembered the teams always tried to outdo each other to make the best ones with the least memory.
Yah, I've seen some of the Clippy alternatives, though mostly just in the options of the US versions. And the app- and function-specific easter eggs were kinda fun, too! I do think Clippy was a bit of a lost opportunity, though. With a bit more thoughtful effort, he could've been a much more useful assistant, rather than something so many of us turned off once we already kinda knew how to use our Office apps.
Oh man, clippy brings back memories. Although it was infamous at the time, now after all these years I think the idea behind it was a noble one. It was an attempt to make computers less intimidating to the average 30-40 year old who didn't grow up with computers and were scared to death of pressing the wrong button or "breaking" something. My first job was on-call tech support, and I couldn't believe how many people would tell me they were scared of their computer.
As a kid in 1999, I had two things; a computer and a broken leg. That time stuck inside lead me to peruse a career in computers/software engineering. These videos are terrific at peeling back all the layers of things I used as a kid, but had no idea about. And the fact it’s from YOU Dave, it feels like I’m getting real inside baseball. Thank you for making these.
I'm an engineer and I really admire people who create daily use things. It was great to see how one of them has been developed. Most people are unaware how much technical knowledge and effort is underneath all those solutions. Thanks for sharing this great story!
Blue...Folders...are...compressed. after nearly 20 years, I finally have the answer. It was a question from my childhood that was never truly answered. Thank you. I can now rest easy
Dave, thank you for my childhood. Thank you for my adulthood watching these videos. Your legacy lives on and your hard work is truly appreciated. Thank you for everything.
Literally all the components that you have created are really important.. Start menu, Task bar, the "run" dialog. Thank you, I am the child of the 90s and been raised with the computers in some small city in the southern Russia :) Traveled the world a lot since then, but your memories make me feel like that curious kid from the 90s once again :)
I'm so very glad I discovered your channel. It's refreshing to hear from senior developers involved in architecture we depend on. I'm autistic myself. I often hear that we make natural programmers. Unfortunately, I'm struggling. Take good care.
I have so much respect for developers like yourself. I can't code to save my life but I've had a love for computers all my life. It's just crazy how much discipline and mental energy it takes to write programs like yourself. Love your content!
I think you need a passion for it, that way you'll invest the time and energy to make it happen. I was originally hobbyist back in the 70s, then worked on my Bachelors in Computer Science then subsequently entered into programming as a professional 23 years ago. I never tire of it provided that the project is an interesting one. Writing reports, documentation etc not so much.
I also think you should have a passion for it. Because from my experience, I would make programs based on what I need for some other project, or just for fun which then I would make some open source for anyone to use. Before I started my freshman year of high school almost 4 years ago, I tried to learn a language like C++ and C# but couldn't understand anything. Then I took a Python programming class, and I remember the stuff I did at home would be exactly what I need to do in class the next day. Now I graduated highschool almost a week ago, and moved onto other programming languages and made a lot of projects during those times. One of which was made for a networking lab, that not only impressed my teacher but also got some people asking for the program. Which I of course gave it to them, after I had to fix an unnoticed bug because I copied and pasted functions without changing some variable names.
You Sir, are history; in the nicest possible way. What a wonderful story told so humbly. Also, love the binary shirt! All the best to you and yours.👍👍👍
Hi Dave. I am one of the young men who built an IMSAI 8080. I still have it and I finished building it on July 4, 1975 in a cabin up in Big Bear. My questions are: 1. Do you remember Dr. Dobbs Journal of Calisthenics and Orthodontia (running light without over-byte)? Since I only had 56K ram, a 2K basic interpreter was too good to pass up. They had published a Tiny Basic, which I typed into my home-brew monitor which was stored into a 2708 EPROM. Oh my, how things have changed. 2. A by the way, I got a copy of MS Basic, at a time when I did not know who Microsoft was yet. The thing I was most impressed with was that it coded just like Basic Plus 2, for which I was developing utilities for our network (1 MBps DecNET) of PDP 11s. After watching your story about the early incarnation of MS Basic, now it all makes sense. 3. You mentioned the way to get the credits from the authors, but you did not mention how to invoke it in Windows 11. Would you be able to fill us in? 4. If you would be interested in my IMSAI (the real deal, not a simulator), I could be cajoled into parting with it for a small price. I have not powered it on in quite some time. It has 56K ram and an 8K EPROM board. A Tarbel Cassette interface, a home built (yes wire-wrapped) that interfaced with a printer that used a TTL parallel interface without buffering. I wrote what turned out to be "double buffering" since the printer would stop accepting data during CR-LFs, before I knew the term double buffering. The IMSAI brought me to a career spanning from 1975 until this year as I retired. Thanks for all your most curious stories, Marc
Hi Marc! My IMSAI is a clone, it would be great to have an original! Drop me a note at the channel email from the About page and we can chat on what it'd take to get you to part with it! Very cool that you were involved that early. I would only have been about 7 years old at the time :-) I've run MSBASIC and CPM on mine, but haven't spent a great deal of time with it. I imagine you've seen the video I did on it? If not, check it out (I bought the computer from wargames, I think it's called). The credits screen is only in Windows NT 4, as far as I know. Win95 had a different one, NT 3.51 had a screensaver one, and so on. But you won't be able to get this one on Win11!
Dave,... Conveying stories like this are very insightful, it also helps to attach some knowledge of how things were created, for those who are computer enthusiasts picking up knowledge and history like this is important because it provides a foundation and completes a more rounded education. I enjoy the stories.... and from another point of view..... You are documenting some history that may never be in textbooks. :-) Please, continue to bring us more behind-the-scenes stories.
Been using your creations every day now for decades without really giving a thought who was behind them ,I guess now is the time to say Thank you for all you brought to the community ! Thank you
win95 osr1 you could click on the start button, and it would put a select box on it (as you see in the NT demonstration here). alt+space would pull up the right click menu, though right clicking would not pop it up. but the alt+space would open it, and the close option would be there. so, at bestbuy or whatever, we would screenshot demo machines, then make the screenshot as the wall paper, close the start button, and hide the task bar, and move all the icons out of frame (make a folder far away from the icons, then select all, drag till everything but the folder is off screen, then delete just the folder, but the folders still look like they're there. from the screenshot wallpaper. including the start button, which is closed. ;) very fun
I managed to learn some networking stuff back in the 1980's. First I got certified on Novell Netware 3.12. Then my large company decided to commit to Windows server, at first 3.51. So I got my MCSE on 3.51/4 and then WIndows 2000 AD. I was always in awe of whoever was behind the scenes creating the stuff. Bottom line I fell into a career in IT managing large AD networks and Exchange systems. I had no college education. Guys like Dave made these kinds of jobs possible. I raised a family and am now comfortably retired. THANK YOU!
I find these videos fascinating for several reasons. Firstly, I really enjoy looking behind the scenes and seeing how things were/are made. This video struck another chord with me though. I'm an avid fiction reader and although there are dozens of books I love, the one I consider my absolute favourite is Microserfs by Douglas Coupland and that book is set at Microsoft HQ in 1994. This video gave me a deeper look into the place where the characters in my heart, Dan, Michael, Susan, Karla, Bug and all the others worked.
Once again, in my c. 1800s rocker, tea in hand, and I get the alert: a drop from The Garage is available. Oh boy! Win Start Menu...sure...let's watch. Turns out, I'm no vegetarian...and as a retired developer, I want to know what's in the sausage. Thanks Dave!
The most impressive technology to me ever is the project function in windows (not a programmer so terminology may be incorrect). The fact that I can drag this youtube video halfway between any two monitors of different dimensions and it plays flawlessly blows my mind. I've tried to figure who is responsible for the project function in windows and have had no luck. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like such an impressive feat.
Your stories of your time at MS as a neurodivergent are massively helpful in my fight against imposer syndrome from my ASD Dave. You improve my days indeed!
I love these stories! To know that I’m working on a system this man and his team introduced long ago is fascinating to me. And when I was in my high school age I did take a few classes in Visual Basic. Among a few other programming languages so when I see code I can get the general gist of it. There are the most advance parts I can’t read but following the logic and reading the functions I can sort of almost understand. All of this is awesome stuff when I think about it. Keep up the great work on these videos! And I’ll keep coming back to watch again. 👍
Congrats! This old histories are very good! When I see on the internet any Win NT stuff, I always think the NT box was beautiful, with this theme day becoming night, different from the cloud day from w98. I never understood why this, now I think NT was supposed to run at night on servers and w98 for the day on workstations😅
I'm not sure on the origin of the branding. It could be a clever play on being "above" the Win95 sky background, in a way. That's also a live gradient painted in the start menu code - it fades to a sold color when then takes over if the menu is taller.
And then with Windows 2000 and ME I also found the squares of 2000 to be more beautiful than the play bricks in Me. There must be a theme of NT being superior to 9x.
Hey Dave, I found your channel today, and I'm obsessed! I'm autistic like you, and software development and the history of technology are part of my special interest. It's amazing to see both someone talking about these things, and evidence that someone like me can go so far in life! Thanks for your videos :^)
I would love to hear your experiences with the changes to the file system as MS moved from 8.3 to todays long filenames. Seems to me there must be plenty of interesting stories. Cheers!
I enjoy these talks as I spent 2 years at Florida Computer & Business School studying Windows and computer repair. That was many years ago but your videos add the missing link of the human dimension that was not and could not be taught in those classes. Thanks for taking the time to record these videos.
Yeah, that's when and how the prompt became emulated. I believe the process finished with Win 98 SP2, and between IE5 and IE6. And interface? What is that for ridiculous naming? Are you a manager? Support? After-sales?
You did well David. As a SysAdmin back in those days, I moved all PCs I managed directly from WFW 3.11 to NT 4.0 and never touched Windows 95 or 98. As a salaried employee I saved hundreds of hours of support time on systems that crashed about 95% less.
I have used every Windows version including versions with the briefcase and never used it once. I guess in early laptops was supposed to be stuff you could copy and later sync or something - baffles me to this day. Never met anyone that found use for it.
Damn it’s so satisfying to learn about things we’ve all been using since our childhood. I just finished watching the task manager video. Great video Dave!
DOS through early versions of Windows was my youth, your videos have been so fascinating to watch, a unique perspective and insight into things others on the outside looking in could never provide.
Love the history Dave. As an inventor of data compression algorithms, I love the story of Zip folders in particular. It makes me look fondly back three decades to a time when everything felt so very new. Thanks again!
I fully appreciate Dave's explanation of dealing with RISC processors. In the mid 1990s, my team (we developed railroad and rail transit control systems) ported our application from DEC machines to the Alpha processor, Having to deal with 64-bit words as well as data alignment, and weirdly interruptible- and non-interruptible groups of instructions, was a major effort. Though most of our code was in C, we had some assembly routines (mostly for performance), and it was a good 2 years before we found and fixed all the bugs we could find. Many of those fixes were at the customer site, following some failure or weird operation of the system, some of which brought all trains to a halt for several minutes, not good when the main goal is to safely move people.
Great video! I'm somewhat confused by one thing though, you describe the NT Cairo shell as being seperate from the earlier Windows 95 one and competing, but I'm fairly sure I've seen that same shell in the very earliest publicly available Windows 95 betas. I always figured the final Windows 95 shell one was simply an evolution from this early design, is this not the case?
Yes that screenshot is of what was then called the Tray. Cairo was supposed to blur the line between a filesystem and database. They tried again in Longhorn and failed, the end result was Libraries in Win7.
@@WndSks I did some more googling and the screenshot apparently -is- from Cairo's GUI component which apparently came -before- Windows 95's taskbar which was based on the work done for Cairo, according to Wiki and Betawiki anyway. But if that's the case, I don't really understand the timeline mentioned in the video.
Thank you Dave, and the rest of the team for bringing us one of the most revolutionary OS's of all time. The first job I had out of college was tech support & domain administration on NT Server 4 & SCO Unix systems. I always felt lucky I got into the industry at that moment. I always loved the start menu on the NT systems, truly inspired work!
The best part is when you talk about localisation. Because this is an important part of providing a product internationally that sometimes is just completely ignored. Many mistakes are done by a lot of software developers. Like for example how plenty of languages makes a distinction of singular and plural adjectives, so you can't have the same adjective describing something, such as the status of an object and the menu option of all objects with this status. The English equivalent is to mark an animal as a "cat", and then having the category of all "cats" and both has to be the same text in the code. Another example is how so many websites (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, ...) all always have the birthday input in the order of month-day-year despite that almost all languages that these services are translated to put the dates in day-month-year. Sure the month name is written out, but if you've always throughout your whole life has written your Birthday as [1] [July] [1900] to then being forced to have it written as [July] [1] [1900] it will cause some confusion. Google and Facebook gets this right though, and as far as I've seen, the other websites can fix this too by simply reorder the items in the code. A single drag-and-drop in Chrome Inspect Element fixes the order. Other issues are things like forcing 12 hour times on cultures exlusivly using 24 hour time, which Twitter and Twitch sometimes do in certain contexts, or how Google assumes everyone is using a US keyboard and will write shortcuts incorrect or read keystrokes incorrect.
Hi Dave, This not a comment regarding the video! I started watching the channel a few weeks ago. Which is really quite a coincidence as up until last week I was waiting for the official diagnosis for ADHD. And to my surprise I get told that I actually have more symptoms of ASD! So watching your channel these past weeks has helped me a lot and I'm quite inspired. However, what brought to write the comment was the coincidence, or maybe it just the algorithm knowing me better than me! Thanks
Really appreciate the trip down memory lane. I spent a lot of time with sustained engineering work and debugging odd customer problems, but these stories were the fun part of the code. As odd as it sounds, I always rather enjoyed browsing the code to find those debug mode flags the devs left in the code in retail build. Definitely helpful for those "that is never supposed to happen" situations.
I wrote the version that ships in windows, but the game already existed for WIn95 from Maxis. So I'm by no means the creator of the game, just the programmer who made it all work on Windows NT/XP/2000/etc.
Dave, this is important stuff. It has a historical significance. If you and others in Microsoft don't leave a record of your work then it will become little more than folklore. I'm sure there are non-disclosure obstacles but we would still like to know. Go deep Dave and make our day.
As Microsoft engineer in the field for 30 years your channel has been awesome to watch. I have always wondered why some of things are the way there. I have been making a list. The top two on my list and ones that I have cussed for years and still don’t work is who built the download timer and file transfer timer. I have always said they must have been a weather man because it could be wrong every time and still have a job.
People either *love* or *hate* the Start Menu. It was such a departure from the common GUI interactions people were used to. Both Windows and Mac OS had applications in folders that each opened in a new window (by default)...
What I like is that Dave is kinda like our cyber grandpa, with all due respect to him and his real life family. I really like the storytelling. This channel is a treasure.
Oh, the memories (nightmares?) of my brief time working with SLM back in my early days at MS as a contractor in BackOffice. I really enjoy these walks down memory lane and hearing the stories. 💜 Thank you for sharing!
This got nothing to do with the start menu but just figured this is a goodest places in need to ask. Love to see a video on your thoughts on why stuff is not fixed in Windows and Outlook and office that has been bugs for decades. There's outlook issues that have been an issue since office 95. There's lack of features that have been supported by third-party applications and not added to Windows while other Windows features that nobody cares about are shellaced under the front. Appreciate your input.
Some of that is maintaining compatibility with the decades of scripts and functions and such that companies have built on top of MS programs. Like Excel's calendar logic still mistakenly has Feb 29, 1900 as a real date*, to stay compatible with early PC stuff inherited from Lotus 1-2-3. * In the Gregorian calendar, '00 years _aren't_ leap years unless they're divisible by 400 -- because otherwise the calendar would drift farther away from the seasons by about 3/4 of a day per century.
Dude- I am SO glad I found your channel! I can remember loving NT 3.51 back in the day- so solid compared to Win3.1 and then 95. I can remember buying a copy of NT 4.0 when it was released- so wild hearing these stories.
pretty kickass. you're the reason we can just browse through a zip file without a 3rd party app. cool videos, the microsoft insider stories are interesting.
amazing! , i supported and have used systems from dos/3.1 all the way through all windows OS's to today, fascinating listening to someone who coded windows and the features ive used for decades, thanks for making these vids!! 😁👍
I have absolutely no clue what all the programming jargon means but my dream is to become a programmer so I still really enjoy your videos. I found your channel via the task manager video and I'm guessing you're very likely to gain many many more followers through these 'behind the scenes' videos. Thanks!
Genuinely enjoy these episodes, both on the task manager and this one on the start menu. I remember, I think it was back when the original age of empires was released (I think I was about 9 or 10), wondering who wrote the code for "all the things in windows". Feel good throwback. I think I ran AOE on our first pentium computer with windows 95 that could connect through modem to the internet. "ARE YOU ON THE INTERNET AGAIN" when someone in the household picked up the phone.
This brought a lot of memories! Thanks for putting this content out. It would be interesting if you can also talk a little bit about Windows XP and why is still relevant for some of us twenty years later.
Interestingly, it's not so much XP as windows 2000 that was ground breaking. XP started off as 2000 with a better looking shell. Windows 2000 even had a 64 bit edition!
Fascinating, thank you, that was very enjoyable for a retired programmer who started his career developing software for RSX11M/S/Plus/Micro, RSTS and even DOS-11. Later I was reluctantly using MS-DOS, '95 & '98 before the relief of a proper operating system from Mr Cutler, Windows-NT.
Thanks! I always enjoy these behind the scenes stories, learning about Easter Eggs, and the issues with porting code from ASCII to Unicode. I hope you keep sharing!
The Start Menu was GENIUS !!! "Run" is my most often used part even today. Only one thing it made wrong: Drag and drop a program on desktop, and it MOVED the link, it disappeared from the start menu. Especially fun with NT4 up to Server 2008 R2 when one of the admins did this drag and drop with a link from the "all users" start menu, removing it for everybody else. Apart from that move weirdness one of the best innovations in usability!
I worked on the ReactOS Project, the Open Source windows clone (and the Wine Win32 API replacment for Linux) and I love seeing these videos so I can see the different ways we tackled these problems.
Thank you so much for sharing all this. I live for this kind of thing as a dev, (VR now) and hearing it from "the horse's mouth" so to say is incredible. Thanks again this is super inspirational Dave!!
Came over from Novell kicking and screaming.. but Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 were revolutionary and effectively killed Novell NetWare. Went to work for a Microsoft reseller and now retired. It is great to watch your videos and get the back story on many of the "quirks" we came ot know and deal with along with "how the sausage was made"
TL DR, I've used windows since 1997 and ive had quite the adventures in doing so which is why i love your insights. -- For me, the thing I love about your series is, I am intimately familiar with windows home versions since 3.11. i have used each version of windows for years and upgraded or bought into the next. I remember trying to use 13 floppy disks needed for windows 95, and diskette 11 failing. try as I might, it would not successfully decompress. So, I had to go buy the Windows 95 CD, meaning I also had to upgrade my PC with a cdrom drive, and learn to load the cdrom driver in my autoexec batch and config.sys. Fortunately, since I did have windows 3.11, I could purchase the upgrade 95 instead of buying the full version, and i was off to the races using windows 95 on my dell 486 dx 66 that i got used from a donation. this was in 1997, and everyone else around was on the new shiny Pentiums with MMX, so the old x86ers were junk with no MMX, but I was happy with my junker clunker dx2, that I eventually upgraded to a dx4 thanks to a friend who bought a new "celeron" computer with windows 98. I scavenged his 8 megs of ram and his dx4, and put that into my old dell desktop, and clocked the motherboard bus to 33x3. Now I had 99 mhz processing power. I was actually happy on my Windows 95 486 dx4 with 16 mb ram, until I was told my pc could run Windows 98, and I knew then I had to upgrade. 98 was everything I knew about 95 but better. From that point, I had Windows 98SE, then Windows ME, running in that DX4, until lightening put it out of its misery, which is a good thing because Windows ME on that dx4 was slow and lots of hdd chugging because of 16 megs of ram. I dont know how I got it to run, but it didnt last long. My next system was a compaq presario 5000 (with the blue face) that came with 98 on a celeron, thanks to a relative who upgraded her pc. It was a nicer looking system with 128 megs of pc 133 ram. I was given a copy of Windows 2000, by my college, (for student use), where I started studying microcomputers. I realized quickly though, that this great looking presario was not my friend, and it suffered from popped caps and I had to trash it. It was very sad since it was a sweet looking case, but filled with junk from 2001. My next computer was a used gateway 2000 Pentium 3 1ghz with 256 megs of ram and Windows XP, which was the new shiny hotness, and everyone had to have it. The college provided me with a copy of XP, and my it was incredible. Later as i got more into my career in IT, I got a copy of vista on a dell and thought it had interesting things, but was not as simplistic and elegant as XP, so I stayed on XP as long as possible, and even dual-booted a 98 SE system with XP so I could have that DOS gaming functionality when desired. I played World of Warcraft endlessly on that machine over a dial up connection, but all good things must come to an end, and the gateway died on me. So I had to get another PC. This one was a used office computer that was salvaged from e-waste. it came with Vista, so I got used to using it, and soon I got to appreciate vista 64 bit being able to do more with the new 64 bit CPU. Of course, in time, I began to run Windows 7 8, 8.1, 10 and now 11 at work. I have used all of them for either fun/personal or professional use for countless hours, and they have been part of my life for decades. This is why I am grateful for the look inside how these pieces of my life were built from one of the architects. Thank you. I hope maybe you are still developing or consulting on the side, since it seems you still got the knack for it.
Being a coder as well, watching your videos are like sitting around and talking shop. But in adition to writing code, i also did hardware design. I have product in some very interesting places here in the US as well as some other very large countries. Since I was both a hardware designer and the software engineer for my own projects i was also in the group that trouble shot hardware designs of other hardware engineers. A lot of my stuff was written in assembler. And speeking of Commodore, lol I used to know the 6502s, 6511s VIC 20 AND COMMODORE 64. I thought the raster interrupt and the VIC sound chip was awesome I actually built the SID chip into some other devices. But since they had phase 2 clocks getting them to play nice with intel microcontrollers was an interesting trick. Great Video!
It's so rare to get behind-the-scenes firsthand accounts from the actual people involved... thank you for making these!
It's interesting, but there's more to the story that he's not telling.
For example, Phil Katz wrote the original PKARC program in the DOS days as a compression module when BBSes were everywhere.
This was followed by a bit of controversy over who owned the rights to the compression algorithm, so Katz wrote a new algorithm called PKZIP.
There's some who claim that Microsoft stole ARC from Katz, which is why he wrote ZIP and Katz's name fell into obscurity.
Regardless who's side you take, Dave should have at least mentioned Katz and given Katz at least some of the credit instead of making it seem like he wrote ZIP.
@@fredashay Wrong, there's already ZIP file program implementations others than PKZIP back in early 90's like open-sourced Info-ZIP. Sure he's not invented ZIP file, but it is not impossible to anyone to write ZIP parser as Dave claimed, since Phill Katz's PKWARE have published ZIP file specification in early day. Also can you give evidence if Microsoft stole Katz's code as you claimed? The only information is the ARC author (Thom Henderson) is the one who accused PK, not Microsoft. Then if you don't have enough strong evidence, don't spread lie by misinformation. What a irony...
@@fredashay What? Dude are you okay typing that not on high? 😂🤣 Just because you can search on google doesn't mean you right. In the fact after I researching again on google as you said, I didn't find your claim. May you misunderstand history but Microsoft even never involved on ARC/ZIP feud, in the fact it's feud between ARC author & Phil Katz. Or may you got "trust me" source and you just blatantly agree? You even said Dave is lie and can't provide any source of claim how he lied. Sorry, I'm not defend Microsoft, since I have rather than use Linux distros and free alternative for now, I just debunk your nonsense claim. I don't feed trolls like you and I'm sure others readers won't agree for you at all
@@fredashay He didn't say that he wrote ZIP. He said he wrote a ZIP-file parser (indicating that ZIP compression already existed) that eventually became his shareware program Visual ZIP. And that was later incorporated into Windows.
@@fredashay Did you even watch the video? He didn't take all the credit. He didn't talk about Phil Katz or PKZip because it was irrelevant to what he was talking about.
"Software is like a sausage, maybe you just don't wanna know how it's made"
Gold
Problem is that the Coca Cola doesn't need to explain itself to anyone beyond shareholders; it a secret recipe meant for business.
Open source and Linux are more like a cookbook.
I personally like the behind the scenes stories about product development that Dave Produces
They added ads to the start menu. Look how they massacred the wonderfully efficient start menu
Yes. Its sad :’)
You can open the registry and disable them and the stupid bing search thing
I wonder what the look on Dave's face was when he first tried Windows 8's full screen only start menu
Just rip them out?
@@1964cattyou're missing the point: you shouldn't have to!
I divorced windows 6 years ago! 100% Linux since then.
For those that are curious about the green window: the windows behind me are powered by NightDriverLED.com and for some reason the green window kept losing WiFi and I couldn't tell until edited because it was all behind me... so I added the "No WiFi" logo when the window quits :-)
Thank you, i thought it was a easter egg but I didn't understand it!
No
Now that I am going back and watching it, and seeing the logo pop on and off as Dave is calmly talking through his video is quite entertaining. The subtle humor is great.
What was with the green box though? I understand glen cant read it but there must be a backstory.
Sweet! This is the first I've seen of the installation wizard. There goes my three day weekend. Can we get an update on the Mesmerizer board?
@@calebbell5018 I was about to try and work out the hidden message.
It was possible to change "START" to "STOP" or any other string 5 characters or less. The string is stored in explorer.exe which could be modified using a hex editor for instance. You had to copy explorer, rename it, edit it, delete the original and save the modified copy as explorer.exe.
Upon reboot i was the coolest kid in 7th grade!
what about languages with a longer string ? You could add even more characters right ?
Cooler still were the win95 days (I think iut was fixed in 98+) where if you put the keyboard focus on the Start button (I think you had to dismiss the menu), and then did alt+space, it gave you the system menu that you'd usually expect from regular windows. Now, you might think that if you hit 'close' you closed the shell.. and you'd be wrong. All it would accomplish was that your start button would entirely disappear from the taskbar.
It was a very fun way to troll friends back in the day.
@@seremptos my memory is that the string was 5 characters long so you had to fill the unused characters with spaces if the word you were replacing START with had less than 5 characters.
I believe if you added more than 5 characters the checksum of explorer.exe would be wrong and the program would not execute.
Edit- Everyone is saying that the checksum would change with any edit and that sounds right. All I know is that if you changed the file too much it would not run.
@@Aviertje now that is something I never knew about!
I remember doing a hexedit on explorer and I did it wrong and explorer would no longer work. That is when I learned that you could run a program from task manager
Being a teenager around the 95/NT era, I remember looking at NT3 and NT4 with excitement and awe. I would read magazines and articles about these powerful operating systems, imagining running them on my computer and using their tools. Operating Systems were exciting in a way they seldom are (if not entirely aren't) anymore.
I used NT to run my BBS (PCBoard) with 2 nodes because Win95 failed miserably regarding multitasking/background process resource management. Used Win95-98SE only for gaming/multimedia. Was pretty happy when XP came around covering both worlds.
I really got into computers around the time Windows 98 was around but had access to plenty of machines that were way too old and slow to run 98 or 95 in any usable way, so I got knee-deep into DOS and Windows 3.1 territory trying to make these old machines somewhat usable. My neighbour gave me a big pile of late-80s DOS magazines that were quite helpful trying to mess with old hardware, one of them contained a massive table with config data for hundreds of MFM hard drive models. Some manufacturers, like Seagate, migrated even their oldest data to the internet and made it available free of charge by the late 90s but for some more obscure models you had to rely on paper data from back in the day. At school we had IBM PS/VP 486 DX2/66 machines with a stunning 8 MB of RAM and 250 MB hard drives that were completely overwhelmed by Win 95 and Office 97 so - with the admin's consent - I downgraded ours to DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 running Word 6.0. Together with a free Epson dot matrix printer and a bunch of DOS games it was quite useful well into the early 2000s. I'm surprised we never got any noise complaints about that printer, our classroom was on the third floor and you could hear the printer by the front door on the ground floor, even with the classroom door closed.
I loved the computer magazines back then - and the Best Buy ads! We got a decent computer in 1997 - I was in my mid teens. Got it at Sam’s Club 😆. I’ve been a UI designer for over 20 years - it all started with MS Paint on my friend’s computer several years before my family got one.
I used to do the same thing. Windows was exciting around that era. I remember dreaming of having a computer of my own that could run Windows 95, as I still had a hand-me-down running 3.1 at that time. I'd say the excitement continued into the XP era. I think Vista's failure not only ended hype for Windows releases but made people dread them. I think in terms of usability and stability, 7 was as good as it gets on the desktop.
@@bchristian85 Same here! I also dreamed of having my own computer. I also looked forward Comp USA, and Circuit City ads in the Sunday newspaper. Today I still open up the Microcenter emails even though I don’t need anything. 😆 I eventually built a computer to call my own which I needed for design school circa 2000. A little later I got a Toshiba laptop which I also loved dearly - I was inspired by Eric Jordan’s laptop (founder of 2advanced studios a popular web design company) which was a Toshiba. XP was my fav windows OS and I used it for a long time until switching to Mac for my main computer. Been using Macs mainly since 2007. In 2016 I built a beastly PC for special 3D rendering work. It’s a dual Xeon 20 core machine with four Evga GTX 1070 FTW Hybrid water cooled GPUs. It’s a pretty exotic machine and weighs about 50lbs. It runs on a ASUS workstation motherboard with error correcting server class RAM. 64GB of RAM in that PC, my Mac has 72GB of RAM. I’m happy to have been a part of the early mainstream days of the internet, it was an exciting time and very different from today! 😍 Cheers! 🍻
Thanks for the trip down memory lane Dave. I worked in building 17 for three years, having been transferred from Charlotte, NC to Seattle to work on the AnswerWizard(clippy). I was there from '94--98. I had forgotten about SLM until you mentioned it. I still remember going through one of the buildings and seeing all the versions of alternatives to Clippy that the animators had made for all the other languages of MS Office. The dolphin and secretary from the Japanese version always come to mind. And the different easter eggs for the Word and Excel versions were fun. I remembered the teams always tried to outdo each other to make the best ones with the least memory.
Yah, I've seen some of the Clippy alternatives, though mostly just in the options of the US versions. And the app- and function-specific easter eggs were kinda fun, too!
I do think Clippy was a bit of a lost opportunity, though. With a bit more thoughtful effort, he could've been a much more useful assistant, rather than something so many of us turned off once we already kinda knew how to use our Office apps.
You're a brave man admitting to being one of the people behind the annoying as hell Clippy :D
The Japan-only assistants were nice! Kairu the dolphin, Sun Wukong and Saeko-sensei, the secretary (or “OL”, office lady, in Japanese).
@@CapTVchilenaShootingStarMax i found that the secretary animation looked horrible when it was downsized.
Oh man, clippy brings back memories. Although it was infamous at the time, now after all these years I think the idea behind it was a noble one. It was an attempt to make computers less intimidating to the average 30-40 year old who didn't grow up with computers and were scared to death of pressing the wrong button or "breaking" something. My first job was on-call tech support, and I couldn't believe how many people would tell me they were scared of their computer.
Dave, man, this stuff is fascinating! The origins, the war stories, the history. And you deliver it all so entertainingly.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
As a kid in 1999, I had two things; a computer and a broken leg. That time stuck inside lead me to peruse a career in computers/software engineering. These videos are terrific at peeling back all the layers of things I used as a kid, but had no idea about. And the fact it’s from YOU Dave, it feels like I’m getting real inside baseball. Thank you for making these.
I'm an engineer and I really admire people who create daily use things. It was great to see how one of them has been developed. Most people are unaware how much technical knowledge and effort is underneath all those solutions. Thanks for sharing this great story!
Yep, developing with native win32 C api is so nitty gritty that most people wouldn't believe how much code you have to write to just make a window.
Blue...Folders...are...compressed. after nearly 20 years, I finally have the answer. It was a question from my childhood that was never truly answered. Thank you. I can now rest easy
Msft is about to change that in the next insiders release. They'll be pulling a bunch of legacy File Explorer options.
Dave, thank you for my childhood. Thank you for my adulthood watching these videos. Your legacy lives on and your hard work is truly appreciated. Thank you for everything.
Literally all the components that you have created are really important.. Start menu, Task bar, the "run" dialog.
Thank you, I am the child of the 90s and been raised with the computers in some small city in the southern Russia :) Traveled the world a lot since then, but your memories make me feel like that curious kid from the 90s once again :)
I'm so very glad I discovered your channel. It's refreshing to hear from senior developers involved in architecture we depend on.
I'm autistic myself. I often hear that we make natural programmers. Unfortunately, I'm struggling.
Take good care.
12:08 “I’m never quite sure how my humor is received by some folks, so…”
Too real Dave 😆
I have so much respect for developers like yourself. I can't code to save my life but I've had a love for computers all my life. It's just crazy how much discipline and mental energy it takes to write programs like yourself. Love your content!
I think you need a passion for it, that way you'll invest the time and energy to make it happen. I was originally hobbyist back in the 70s, then worked on my Bachelors in Computer Science then subsequently entered into programming as a professional 23 years ago. I never tire of it provided that the project is an interesting one. Writing reports, documentation etc not so much.
I also think you should have a passion for it. Because from my experience, I would make programs based on what I need for some other project, or just for fun which then I would make some open source for anyone to use. Before I started my freshman year of high school almost 4 years ago, I tried to learn a language like C++ and C# but couldn't understand anything. Then I took a Python programming class, and I remember the stuff I did at home would be exactly what I need to do in class the next day.
Now I graduated highschool almost a week ago, and moved onto other programming languages and made a lot of projects during those times. One of which was made for a networking lab, that not only impressed my teacher but also got some people asking for the program. Which I of course gave it to them, after I had to fix an unnoticed bug because I copied and pasted functions without changing some variable names.
Brilliant. I was a young help desk tech helping people through their computing experience.
You Sir, are history; in the nicest possible way. What a wonderful story told so humbly. Also, love the binary shirt! All the best to you and yours.👍👍👍
Dave, there are thousands of people that have stories like your in tech and programming but you are the ONLY one that is gracious enough to SHARE!!!
Hi Dave. I am one of the young men who built an IMSAI 8080. I still have it and I finished building it on July 4, 1975 in a cabin up in Big Bear. My questions are:
1. Do you remember Dr. Dobbs Journal of Calisthenics and Orthodontia (running light without over-byte)? Since I only had 56K ram, a 2K basic interpreter was too good to pass up. They had published a Tiny Basic, which I typed into my home-brew monitor which was stored into a 2708 EPROM. Oh my, how things have changed.
2. A by the way, I got a copy of MS Basic, at a time when I did not know who Microsoft was yet. The thing I was most impressed with was that it coded just like Basic Plus 2, for which I was developing utilities for our network (1 MBps DecNET) of PDP 11s. After watching your story about the early incarnation of MS Basic, now it all makes sense.
3. You mentioned the way to get the credits from the authors, but you did not mention how to invoke it in Windows 11. Would you be able to fill us in?
4. If you would be interested in my IMSAI (the real deal, not a simulator), I could be cajoled into parting with it for a small price. I have not powered it on in quite some time. It has 56K ram and an 8K EPROM board. A Tarbel Cassette interface, a home built (yes wire-wrapped) that interfaced with a printer that used a TTL parallel interface without buffering. I wrote what turned out to be "double buffering" since the printer would stop accepting data during CR-LFs, before I knew the term double buffering. The IMSAI brought me to a career spanning from 1975 until this year as I retired.
Thanks for all your most curious stories,
Marc
Hi Marc! My IMSAI is a clone, it would be great to have an original! Drop me a note at the channel email from the About page and we can chat on what it'd take to get you to part with it! Very cool that you were involved that early. I would only have been about 7 years old at the time :-)
I've run MSBASIC and CPM on mine, but haven't spent a great deal of time with it. I imagine you've seen the video I did on it? If not, check it out (I bought the computer from wargames, I think it's called).
The credits screen is only in Windows NT 4, as far as I know. Win95 had a different one, NT 3.51 had a screensaver one, and so on. But you won't be able to get this one on Win11!
Dave,... Conveying stories like this are very insightful, it also helps to attach some knowledge of how things were created, for those who are computer enthusiasts picking up knowledge and history like this is important because it provides a foundation and completes a more rounded education. I enjoy the stories.... and from another point of view..... You are documenting some history that may never be in textbooks. :-) Please, continue to bring us more behind-the-scenes stories.
These videos are an incredible look into such a cool and important part of tech history. Thanks so
Much for making these!!
Been using your creations every day now for decades without really giving a thought who was behind them ,I guess now is the time to say Thank you for all you brought to the community ! Thank you
Everything you make is extremely historically significant. Thank you so much for making these.
Amazing episode as always, Dave!
Thank you for sharing yet another chapter in the history archives
This is amazing... being a behind the scenes look into the tech that influenced my life and made me want to get into tech 20 years ago. Thank you.
please continue this "Insider Secrets" series. First hand history lessons like this are fantastic!
I always loved the sideways banner. Great work on that!
win95 osr1 you could click on the start button, and it would put a select box on it (as you see in the NT demonstration here). alt+space would pull up the right click menu, though right clicking would not pop it up. but the alt+space would open it, and the close option would be there. so, at bestbuy or whatever, we would screenshot demo machines, then make the screenshot as the wall paper, close the start button, and hide the task bar, and move all the icons out of frame (make a folder far away from the icons, then select all, drag till everything but the folder is off screen, then delete just the folder, but the folders still look like they're there. from the screenshot wallpaper. including the start button, which is closed. ;) very fun
I managed to learn some networking stuff back in the 1980's. First I got certified on Novell Netware 3.12. Then my large company decided to commit to Windows server, at first 3.51. So I got my MCSE on 3.51/4 and then WIndows 2000 AD. I was always in awe of whoever was behind the scenes creating the stuff. Bottom line I fell into a career in IT managing large AD networks and Exchange systems. I had no college education. Guys like Dave made these kinds of jobs possible. I raised a family and am now comfortably retired. THANK YOU!
Great behind the scenes stories! Using Windows all these decades, it's fun to discover you created a lot of the stuff we use.
I find these videos fascinating for several reasons. Firstly, I really enjoy looking behind the scenes and seeing how things were/are made. This video struck another chord with me though. I'm an avid fiction reader and although there are dozens of books I love, the one I consider my absolute favourite is Microserfs by Douglas Coupland and that book is set at Microsoft HQ in 1994. This video gave me a deeper look into the place where the characters in my heart, Dan, Michael, Susan, Karla, Bug and all the others worked.
Once again, in my c. 1800s rocker, tea in hand, and I get the alert: a drop from The Garage is available. Oh boy! Win Start Menu...sure...let's watch. Turns out, I'm no vegetarian...and as a retired developer, I want to know what's in the sausage. Thanks Dave!
The most impressive technology to me ever is the project function in windows (not a programmer so terminology may be incorrect). The fact that I can drag this youtube video halfway between any two monitors of different dimensions and it plays flawlessly blows my mind. I've tried to figure who is responsible for the project function in windows and have had no luck. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like such an impressive feat.
Hey David!
Thank you so much for sharing these stories.
Wonderful to hear about development during the 90s era!
Your stories of your time at MS as a neurodivergent are massively helpful in my fight against imposer syndrome from my ASD Dave. You improve my days indeed!
I love these stories! To know that I’m working on a system this man and his team introduced long ago is fascinating to me.
And when I was in my high school age I did take a few classes in Visual Basic. Among a few other programming languages so when I see code I can get the general gist of it. There are the most advance parts I can’t read but following the logic and reading the functions I can sort of almost understand.
All of this is awesome stuff when I think about it.
Keep up the great work on these videos! And I’ll keep coming back to watch again. 👍
my firts use of Windows was 3.11 and then 98 these were amazing days. Great channel. Greetings from Tunisia.
Congrats! This old histories are very good! When I see on the internet any Win NT stuff, I always think the NT box was beautiful, with this theme day becoming night, different from the cloud day from w98. I never understood why this, now I think NT was supposed to run at night on servers and w98 for the day on workstations😅
I'm not sure on the origin of the branding. It could be a clever play on being "above" the Win95 sky background, in a way. That's also a live gradient painted in the start menu code - it fades to a sold color when then takes over if the menu is taller.
And then with Windows 2000 and ME I also found the squares of 2000 to be more beautiful than the play bricks in Me. There must be a theme of NT being superior to 9x.
Hey Dave,
I found your channel today, and I'm obsessed! I'm autistic like you, and software development and the history of technology are part of my special interest. It's amazing to see both someone talking about these things, and evidence that someone like me can go so far in life! Thanks for your videos :^)
Same! I also have autism and am interested in technology!
I would love to hear your experiences with the changes to the file system as MS moved from 8.3 to todays long filenames. Seems to me there must be plenty of interesting stories. Cheers!
I enjoy these talks as I spent 2 years at Florida Computer & Business School studying Windows and computer repair. That was many years ago but your videos add the missing link of the human dimension that was not and could not be taught in those classes. Thanks for taking the time to record these videos.
The Windows 95 shell update that came with MSIE 4.0 was magnificent. I loved the hover interface.
Yeah, that's when and how the prompt became emulated.
I believe the process finished with Win 98 SP2, and between IE5 and IE6.
And interface? What is that for ridiculous naming? Are you a manager? Support? After-sales?
You did well David. As a SysAdmin back in those days, I moved all PCs I managed directly from WFW 3.11 to NT 4.0 and never touched Windows 95 or 98. As a salaried employee I saved hundreds of hours of support time on systems that crashed about 95% less.
In entreprise world made much more sense to use NT unless you had any legacy application that still needed ms-dos to work.
I had a heck of a time justifying the extra cost of NT licenses. It was worth the effort though.
Love the binary shirt. Any chance of a link to where you got hold of it?
Really great stories from the old days! It’s great that MS was supportive of their folks shipping their own software, developed on their own.
Briefcase ... now that would be an interesting story, like, starting with what it was actually meant to be 😅
I have used every Windows version including versions with the briefcase and never used it once. I guess in early laptops was supposed to be stuff you could copy and later sync or something - baffles me to this day. Never met anyone that found use for it.
Dave's channel is the best channel on youtube. Maybe one of the most valuable too.
Damn it’s so satisfying to learn about things we’ve all been using since our childhood. I just finished watching the task manager video. Great video Dave!
Thanks! Glad this kind of content is appreciated! I've only got so many stories, and might do a few shorts as well, but will share what I remember!
DOS through early versions of Windows was my youth, your videos have been so fascinating to watch, a unique perspective and insight into things others on the outside looking in could never provide.
Love the history Dave. As an inventor of data compression algorithms, I love the story of Zip folders in particular.
It makes me look fondly back three decades to a time when everything felt so very new.
Thanks again!
I'm the writer of BWTC32Key, a file compression program
I fully appreciate Dave's explanation of dealing with RISC processors. In the mid 1990s, my team (we developed railroad and rail transit control systems) ported our application from DEC machines to the Alpha processor, Having to deal with 64-bit words as well as data alignment, and weirdly interruptible- and non-interruptible groups of instructions, was a major effort. Though most of our code was in C, we had some assembly routines (mostly for performance), and it was a good 2 years before we found and fixed all the bugs we could find. Many of those fixes were at the customer site, following some failure or weird operation of the system, some of which brought all trains to a halt for several minutes, not good when the main goal is to safely move people.
Great video! I'm somewhat confused by one thing though, you describe the NT Cairo shell as being seperate from the earlier Windows 95 one and competing, but I'm fairly sure I've seen that same shell in the very earliest publicly available Windows 95 betas. I always figured the final Windows 95 shell one was simply an evolution from this early design, is this not the case?
Yes that screenshot is of what was then called the Tray. Cairo was supposed to blur the line between a filesystem and database. They tried again in Longhorn and failed, the end result was Libraries in Win7.
@@WndSks I did some more googling and the screenshot apparently -is- from Cairo's GUI component which apparently came -before- Windows 95's taskbar which was based on the work done for Cairo, according to Wiki and Betawiki anyway. But if that's the case, I don't really understand the timeline mentioned in the video.
Thank you Dave, and the rest of the team for bringing us one of the most revolutionary OS's of all time. The first job I had out of college was tech support & domain administration on NT Server 4 & SCO Unix systems. I always felt lucky I got into the industry at that moment. I always loved the start menu on the NT systems, truly inspired work!
Dude! I WANT THAT SHIRT! Please tell me where you got it!
The best part is when you talk about localisation. Because this is an important part of providing a product internationally that sometimes is just completely ignored. Many mistakes are done by a lot of software developers. Like for example how plenty of languages makes a distinction of singular and plural adjectives, so you can't have the same adjective describing something, such as the status of an object and the menu option of all objects with this status. The English equivalent is to mark an animal as a "cat", and then having the category of all "cats" and both has to be the same text in the code. Another example is how so many websites (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, ...) all always have the birthday input in the order of month-day-year despite that almost all languages that these services are translated to put the dates in day-month-year. Sure the month name is written out, but if you've always throughout your whole life has written your Birthday as [1] [July] [1900] to then being forced to have it written as [July] [1] [1900] it will cause some confusion. Google and Facebook gets this right though, and as far as I've seen, the other websites can fix this too by simply reorder the items in the code. A single drag-and-drop in Chrome Inspect Element fixes the order. Other issues are things like forcing 12 hour times on cultures exlusivly using 24 hour time, which Twitter and Twitch sometimes do in certain contexts, or how Google assumes everyone is using a US keyboard and will write shortcuts incorrect or read keystrokes incorrect.
Hi Dave,
This not a comment regarding the video!
I started watching the channel a few weeks ago. Which is really quite a coincidence as up until last week I was waiting for the official diagnosis for ADHD. And to my surprise I get told that I actually have more symptoms of ASD! So watching your channel these past weeks has helped me a lot and I'm quite inspired.
However, what brought to write the comment was the coincidence, or maybe it just the algorithm knowing me better than me!
Thanks
11:15 what’s that funny box in the upper right? Asking for a friend….. Glen
Really appreciate the trip down memory lane. I spent a lot of time with sustained engineering work and debugging odd customer problems, but these stories were the fun part of the code. As odd as it sounds, I always rather enjoyed browsing the code to find those debug mode flags the devs left in the code in retail build. Definitely helpful for those "that is never supposed to happen" situations.
where in the hell is that dollar bill today ?!?!
I’m an IT infrastructure architect. I absolutely love these stories. Thank you so much!
Dude, you wrote pinball? I got banned from my school's computer lab for playing that on lab's computer.. good old times
I wrote the version that ships in windows, but the game already existed for WIn95 from Maxis. So I'm by no means the creator of the game, just the programmer who made it all work on Windows NT/XP/2000/etc.
Between task manager and zip folders you have made life so much easier for a metric ton of people.
It's so beautifully nostalgic... I used to work for Dell desktop support... 20 years have flown by... ❤
You're a fantastic storyteller.
Dave, this is important stuff. It has a historical significance. If you and others in Microsoft don't leave a record of your work then it will become little more than folklore. I'm sure there are non-disclosure obstacles but we would still like to know. Go deep Dave and make our day.
Dewd! that shirt is awesome and I'm totally not trying to transcribe it to ASCII in my head.
As Microsoft engineer in the field for 30 years your channel has been awesome to watch. I have always wondered why some of things are the way there. I have been making a list. The top two on my list and ones that I have cussed for years and still don’t work is who built the download timer and file transfer timer. I have always said they must have been a weather man because it could be wrong every time and still have a job.
Check out my video "Blame Me: I worked on the Progress Dialog" for some good dirt on that one!
I grew up on space cadet pinball. Thank you for many hours of joy and encouraging many years of pinball joy to come.
Another great video! You must have had an amazing career knowing that millions of people around the world have made use of your creations.
As a programmer and all out IT lover I would love a signature if this guy he's a bloody legend great job @DavesGarage
People either *love* or *hate* the Start Menu. It was such a departure from the common GUI interactions people were used to. Both Windows and Mac OS had applications in folders that each opened in a new window (by default)...
What I like is that Dave is kinda like our cyber grandpa, with all due respect to him and his real life family. I really like the storytelling. This channel is a treasure.
Oh, the memories (nightmares?) of my brief time working with SLM back in my early days at MS as a contractor in BackOffice.
I really enjoy these walks down memory lane and hearing the stories. 💜
Thank you for sharing!
This got nothing to do with the start menu but just figured this is a goodest places in need to ask. Love to see a video on your thoughts on why stuff is not fixed in Windows and Outlook and office that has been bugs for decades. There's outlook issues that have been an issue since office 95. There's lack of features that have been supported by third-party applications and not added to Windows while other Windows features that nobody cares about are shellaced under the front. Appreciate your input.
Some of that is maintaining compatibility with the decades of scripts and functions and such that companies have built on top of MS programs. Like Excel's calendar logic still mistakenly has Feb 29, 1900 as a real date*, to stay compatible with early PC stuff inherited from Lotus 1-2-3.
* In the Gregorian calendar, '00 years _aren't_ leap years unless they're divisible by 400 -- because otherwise the calendar would drift farther away from the seasons by about 3/4 of a day per century.
I don't use Windows, I am very much a FOSS & Linux user. But I love these videos! Keep it up!
Dude- I am SO glad I found your channel! I can remember loving NT 3.51 back in the day- so solid compared to Win3.1 and then 95. I can remember buying a copy of NT 4.0 when it was released- so wild hearing these stories.
Dave you are such a humble legend! You have no idea how great this content is.
pretty kickass. you're the reason we can just browse through a zip file without a 3rd party app. cool videos, the microsoft insider stories are interesting.
amazing! , i supported and have used systems from dos/3.1 all the way through all windows OS's to today, fascinating listening to someone who coded windows and the features ive used for decades, thanks for making these vids!! 😁👍
You've made (or worked on) so many parts of the OS that I use daily, I both congratulate and thank you.
I have absolutely no clue what all the programming jargon means but my dream is to become a programmer so I still really enjoy your videos. I found your channel via the task manager video and I'm guessing you're very likely to gain many many more followers through these 'behind the scenes' videos.
Thanks!
Genuinely enjoy these episodes, both on the task manager and this one on the start menu. I remember, I think it was back when the original age of empires was released (I think I was about 9 or 10), wondering who wrote the code for "all the things in windows". Feel good throwback. I think I ran AOE on our first pentium computer with windows 95 that could connect through modem to the internet. "ARE YOU ON THE INTERNET AGAIN" when someone in the household picked up the phone.
This brought a lot of memories! Thanks for putting this content out. It would be interesting if you can also talk a little bit about Windows XP and why is still relevant for some of us twenty years later.
Interestingly, it's not so much XP as windows 2000 that was ground breaking. XP started off as 2000 with a better looking shell. Windows 2000 even had a 64 bit edition!
Fascinating, thank you, that was very enjoyable for a retired programmer who started his career developing software for RSX11M/S/Plus/Micro, RSTS and even DOS-11. Later I was reluctantly using MS-DOS, '95 & '98 before the relief of a proper operating system from Mr Cutler, Windows-NT.
Thank you for being apart of Microsoft Pinball, it was my favorite game growing up.
Thanks! I always enjoy these behind the scenes stories, learning about Easter Eggs, and the issues with porting code from ASCII to Unicode. I hope you keep sharing!
I have a new favorite channel on UA-cam! This is pure gold.
I used win 3.5 and 95 as a kid. I cannot tell you how much happier I was for the win 95 menu bar lol
The Start Menu was GENIUS !!! "Run" is my most often used part even today. Only one thing it made wrong: Drag and drop a program on desktop, and it MOVED the link, it disappeared from the start menu. Especially fun with NT4 up to Server 2008 R2 when one of the admins did this drag and drop with a link from the "all users" start menu, removing it for everybody else.
Apart from that move weirdness one of the best innovations in usability!
Your videos are so well made and fascinating to watch! They will go down as real gems in computer history!
Thanks for sharing, Dave! Love to listen to those stories about things we saw and used nearly every day.
I saw your videos a couple times and never clicked, cuz the clickbait seemed bad. It was the blame me videos. I'm glad I finally did.
I worked on the ReactOS Project, the Open Source windows clone (and the Wine Win32 API replacment for Linux) and I love seeing these videos so I can see the different ways we tackled these problems.
Does TaskMgr run on React? Or did they create a whole new one?
Thank you so much for sharing all this. I live for this kind of thing as a dev, (VR now) and hearing it from "the horse's mouth" so to say is incredible. Thanks again this is super inspirational Dave!!
Came over from Novell kicking and screaming.. but Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 were revolutionary and effectively killed Novell NetWare. Went to work for a Microsoft reseller and now retired. It is great to watch your videos and get the back story on many of the "quirks" we came ot know and deal with along with "how the sausage was made"
TL DR, I've used windows since 1997 and ive had quite the adventures in doing so which is why i love your insights.
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For me, the thing I love about your series is, I am intimately familiar with windows home versions since 3.11. i have used each version of windows for years and upgraded or bought into the next. I remember trying to use 13 floppy disks needed for windows 95, and diskette 11 failing. try as I might, it would not successfully decompress. So, I had to go buy the Windows 95 CD, meaning I also had to upgrade my PC with a cdrom drive, and learn to load the cdrom driver in my autoexec batch and config.sys. Fortunately, since I did have windows 3.11, I could purchase the upgrade 95 instead of buying the full version, and i was off to the races using windows 95 on my dell 486 dx 66 that i got used from a donation. this was in 1997, and everyone else around was on the new shiny Pentiums with MMX, so the old x86ers were junk with no MMX, but I was happy with my junker clunker dx2, that I eventually upgraded to a dx4 thanks to a friend who bought a new "celeron" computer with windows 98. I scavenged his 8 megs of ram and his dx4, and put that into my old dell desktop, and clocked the motherboard bus to 33x3. Now I had 99 mhz processing power. I was actually happy on my Windows 95 486 dx4 with 16 mb ram, until I was told my pc could run Windows 98, and I knew then I had to upgrade. 98 was everything I knew about 95 but better. From that point, I had Windows 98SE, then Windows ME, running in that DX4, until lightening put it out of its misery, which is a good thing because Windows ME on that dx4 was slow and lots of hdd chugging because of 16 megs of ram. I dont know how I got it to run, but it didnt last long. My next system was a compaq presario 5000 (with the blue face) that came with 98 on a celeron, thanks to a relative who upgraded her pc. It was a nicer looking system with 128 megs of pc 133 ram. I was given a copy of Windows 2000, by my college, (for student use), where I started studying microcomputers. I realized quickly though, that this great looking presario was not my friend, and it suffered from popped caps and I had to trash it. It was very sad since it was a sweet looking case, but filled with junk from 2001. My next computer was a used gateway 2000 Pentium 3 1ghz with 256 megs of ram and Windows XP, which was the new shiny hotness, and everyone had to have it. The college provided me with a copy of XP, and my it was incredible. Later as i got more into my career in IT, I got a copy of vista on a dell and thought it had interesting things, but was not as simplistic and elegant as XP, so I stayed on XP as long as possible, and even dual-booted a 98 SE system with XP so I could have that DOS gaming functionality when desired. I played World of Warcraft endlessly on that machine over a dial up connection, but all good things must come to an end, and the gateway died on me. So I had to get another PC. This one was a used office computer that was salvaged from e-waste. it came with Vista, so I got used to using it, and soon I got to appreciate vista 64 bit being able to do more with the new 64 bit CPU. Of course, in time, I began to run Windows 7 8, 8.1, 10 and now 11 at work. I have used all of them for either fun/personal or professional use for countless hours, and they have been part of my life for decades. This is why I am grateful for the look inside how these pieces of my life were built from one of the architects. Thank you. I hope maybe you are still developing or consulting on the side, since it seems you still got the knack for it.
Being a coder as well, watching your videos are like sitting around and talking shop. But in adition to writing code, i also did hardware design. I have product in some very interesting places here in the US as well as some other very large countries. Since I was both a hardware designer and the software engineer for my own projects i was also in the group that trouble shot hardware designs of other hardware engineers. A lot of my stuff was written in assembler.
And speeking of Commodore, lol I used to know the 6502s, 6511s VIC 20 AND COMMODORE 64. I thought the raster interrupt and the VIC sound chip was awesome I actually built the SID chip into some other devices. But since they had phase 2 clocks getting them to play nice with intel microcontrollers was an interesting trick.
Great Video!
I love the looking back at Microsoft type of videos! I was always just the network engineer trying to get the stuff to work at the customers site!