The Insider Secrets to Task Manager, Pinball, and More
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- Опубліковано 16 бер 2024
- Retired operating systems engineer Dave Plummer participates in a Microsoft "Ask Me Anything" session about his time in MS-DOS and Windows, such as Task Manager, Pinball, Zip files, the Start Menu, and more.
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0:00: 💻 Retired Microsoft engineer discusses project selection and early career impact.
4:01: 💻 Importance of understanding the entire stack from kernel to user code for debugging and development.
8:16: 💡 Lessons learned from legacy code and impromptu decisions leading to long-term consequences.
12:09: ⚙️ Task Manager optimization for efficient foreground activation.
16:23: ⚙️ AI development shifting focus from training GPUs to local CPU inferencing.
20:17: ⚙️ Development of a display at 30 FPS using 6502 assembly with a purpose to educate on topics like 6502 assembly and FFTs.
24:26: ⚙️ Challenges of porting code between Windows 95 and NT, learning through the process.
28:23: 💼 Challenges of balancing work and family led to leaving dream job at Microsoft to focus on own business.
32:30: ⏰ Balancing work and family life while working remotely and running a business. - Наука та технологія
I’ve worked in IT forever and it used to be that HR would approach a team to say that a new member is autistic and offer some education. It’s kinda humorous because half of the IT staff is already autistic and the other half won’t even notice.
I work in a large-ish tech company and we had this sensitivy training about people on the spectrum...I was like, shouldn't we have sensitivity training about neurotypical people? They're for sure the minority
Thats funny. I find autistic people let other people deal with the awkwardness.
I am definitely on spectrum. Internet. Spectrum Internet
Hey Dave, thnak you so much for taking the time to recreate this excellent Q&A session when the original recording failed. It was great. Also the "I rolled my own security and encryption" has to be the best line ever! Love it!
Glad you enjoyed it!
19:15 “Every byte is sacred, every byte is blessed. Every byte that’s wasted, Dave gets quite obsessed!”
He is not alone. Many people ask themselves why a piece of code is so big.
Let the macboys spill theirs...
LOL!
As we hold these bytes to be sacred, let us not be remiss in our efforts to cull the weak from the stack. Only when good, faithful bytes are fed Their electricity in doing Their purposes, can we count our existence as blessed. Amen. Check the useful. Delete the superfluous.
Spill their what- why can I not have my own @@jerbear7952?? Why am I own an accounting software application jer bear??
You never fail to make me watch the whole thing
Mr 32gb. Absolute legend! Never knew you worked on Amiga. Intuition was a brilliant system. Dave Haynie was a legend.
Well I missed it, oh well. Here's a Q anyway: Win7 dropped a critical feature from WinXP. In XP's Windows Explorer.exe you can sort on file date to select files within a range of dates, then re-sort on filename to find (eg.) a letter you wrote to Susan last July. But in Win7, changing the sort order DEselects all previously selected files, making that incredibly useful function impossible. *Q:* *_W-H-Y_* would Microsoft commit such an obvious act of wanton Vandalism?
I really enjoy the whole aesthetic of your videos. From your calm voice to the beautiful setup and of course the fascinating topics you talk about! Wish you all the best!
Thanks for the kind words!
I never noticed that but it’s defiantly true these videos are outside of the usual you tube format it’s allot more palatable than other tech videos that seem to have a lot of padding. It much better suits a engineers mind that values the raw content and has little interest in you tubers.
We love this for the right reasons not the format.
You are a good man, Dave. Thanks for your content.
The advice on the work / life balance when your kids are growing up is absolutley spot on. I could not agree more. If you are fortunate enough to be able to ease back on the work here and there to do things with your family then grab those oportunities with both hands.
Also, your comments about how Chat GPT helped by looking at the output screenshot just blew my mind, I had no idea it had come that far!
I actually wrote my own regular expression parser in C so that I can learn the syntax. It was not meant to be a full parser of regular expressions
I first installed windows 95 as an upgrade from somewhere between 12 to 14 3.5 inch floppies. Fortunately drivers were provisioned for the old media vision sound card and scsi it had so when all installed my cd rom and sound worked out of the box ! Thank you for all your hard work . I'd give almost anything to have that old 486 sx33 system back!
It was 13 disks :)
Wow. Loved the variety in this video. Thank you
A man of my own heart... or as we say in the UK (One off the wrist). i started with machine code on an Amstrad CPC with 128k of RAM. i loved those days.. no internet and i learned from books at the library. Your vids are excellent and i love every topic. Thanks Dave. Keep it up mate
People still use line editors today. "vi" was spawned off "ed". For those who don't know, "ed" is a a line editor, while "vi" is a "visual" front end to ed to make line-editing easier by letting you position a cursor to select, edit and compose new lines. And yes, to this day, people still use vi and its derivatives to do their text editing. So don't knock it - even in VS Code or Windows on a 4K screen, I have dozens of Vim windows open in my workflow. (VS Code has a really nice Vi plugin)
As a kid in the dos days I hated using edlin to hack Aussie versions of Duke Nukem to enable Gore and until I grew up had no idea that it was a line editor...
What makes vi so powerful is the ability to apply regular expressions. I first picked up vi on BSD running on a Vax in about 1983. It was amazingly empowering after having come from line editors EDIT on RT-11, EDLIN in MS-DOS and ed on Sys-V. I had a chance to meet some of the early AT&T UNIX people in the early 1980s and they explained that vi was in part designed for use in AT&Ts document production departments and was optimized to that aside from the ESC key it typists could keep their hands over the typing keys and not have to move away to function keys. Vi can use function keys if a terminal’s termcap/terminfo has definitions for the keys, but it doesn’t need to. It is possible to easily move between different terminal types without losing productivity in vi. My favorite terminal that really leverages what vi can do with function keys is the HP 2645. A 2645 could run flat out at 9600 bps without doing flow control. VT-100s and PCs had to do flow control like crazy even at 1200 bps and delay due to buffers in modems and UART boards meant text often went missing when flow control didn’t make it to the host in time. That was not an issue with the 2645.
The reason a VT-100 is slow is because the screen is stored as linked list instead of an X-Y grid in order to conserve memory. That also made it possible to make the screen a view port onto a document which could be scrolled back and forth in the terminal rather than having to be retransmitted as it scrolled. The concept didn’t work so well if a data line error caused the view port not to match what the remote host thought. The flow control on the VT-100 aggravated the problem. The HP 2645 did better because flow control did not enter the picture.
Like Dave, I spent a fair amount of time in Borland Turbo C’s UI in the early 1980s. Prior to Turbo C, I had used WordStar on CP/M so Turbo C UI was easy to pick up because it used WordStar key sequences. Even MS-DOS EDIT screen editor used a few WordStar keys (like CTRL-Y). Of course in the modern day, who doesn’t love Visual Studio? - it pretty much does anything you want or need.
Actually, ex came before vi.
Probably the oldest text editor I know is TECO, written by Dan Murphy at MIT in 1962 for the PDP-1. TECO was around for the various PDP operating systems and even VMS. TECO works sort of like sed for UNIX/Linux. The original acronym meant Tape Editor / COrrector but was later changed to Text. The idea was to punch a short change tape on an ASR-33 or Flexowriter, then run TECO to merge the changes into an input stream file then punch a corrected tape. As such, along with sed, these editors take the insurability prize because they’re sort of mode-less with each character either being an actual character or a command. It is quite easy to prove the GIGO rule with these editors.
Note I wrote “text editor _I_ know.” No doubt there are examples of something from the late 1940s and 1950s; I’m just not old enough to know them.
So great to hear these things from the horse's mouth. Amazing that that "you didn't check in more code" but, what you did changed so many people's work day - like millions!
I thoroughly enjoy almost all of your videos. The ones i don't are simply well outside my less diverse scope of interest. Thanks Dave!
lol.. As an embedded engineer printf() would be a luxury! (when I was a lad there were 50 of us living in a cardboard box in t' middle of t' road, walked to work in the pit and it was uphill both ways etc etc). all we had was a single gpio that we could plop up or down, that's all we had for debugging and we were grateful!
We only had ones.
@@DavesGarageOf course the erase gave us 1's, we had to add the 0's.
Importing STDIO and blowing the top off the stack... fun times.
You had a box?!
@@jerbear7952Well, I said box, but it was more of a hole in the ground and we only had warm gravel to eat!
Hey Dave! Great to see this!
I absolutely love this kind of content. Keep doing what makes you happy!
Dave, I've followed your channel since the early days of < 20k subscribers. Like everything else you have described in this video, you mastered UA-cam as well. You are an inspiration.
I'm impressed that you continually find new and interesting things to present to us. Thank you.
Dave a great rebuild of your Q&A, your IPO comment reminded me of an event I was at with Microsoft in 1986 in Sydney.. Fun party as folks celebrated the IPO and as you say a few friends instant millionaires. Needless to say the flight home the following afternoon was very quiet as we nursed sizeable hangovers. Thanks again for these great walks back through your journey.
Awesome video! As a long time Microsoft shop, I love the history!
Great format! Really enjoy the Q&A.
Dave, thanks for re-creating - my son is a devlopment manager in MS - and told me he would record your event for me - then indicated that it did not work correctly.
Just so you know, I have learned some tips from you with respect to how Task mangager works - by watching your channel. Thanks - I enjoy your videos -J-
Great stuff Dave, love your channel!
Thanks for putting this together, Dave, it was very enjoyable!
I love listening to this guy talk.
Thank you Dave for this video
@@_GhostMiner What do you mean?
I just figured out why I enjoy watching your channel. The cadence in your speech evokes a film Noir pattern as seen in the early 50's movies, just before they got too stylized.
This video made me feel so much better in the first few seconds. I thought it was only me who now finds that rather than remembering how to do things, all I need to do now it remember where I did something similar before or where to look for help.
new to your channel and appreciate the detailed and direct overviews of topics you present! Still growing in my engineering role but strive to be like you when I am more seasoned :)
thank you ...nice too hear your life's trip
Thanks for stirring up old memories Dave. I remember Bruce Dawson and his collaborators Colin Fox & Steve LaRocque from our days when we would attend the Panorama Amiga Users group meetings back in the late 1980's. CygnusED was amazing, as was their other product MandFXP. A remember them presenting at the group, talking about how they did Mandelbrot sets all in assembly with integer math for speed. I was impressed.
Your videos are very inspiring. Personally I would like to watch and listen more about programming and programmer stories. But really great content and great channel.
Awesome videos man!! Really appreciate it
Some people just make you want to spend time with them. Dave is most definitely one of those people!
WOW! So many nuggets of real gold in this half hour, I don't know where to start. So I'll just say, "Thank you!" I guess the biggest value of this video is it shows me multiple examples of how little I know.
Thanks Dave, I used your format dialogue this morning …. 😊
What a classic example of the Microsoft of today - the Team meeting failed. Thanks for reconstructing it.
Just found your channel. I was told I'm Autistic w' ADHD 5 years ago at the age of 48. So of course I bought your book too. Can't wait to read it today. Thanks for talking about these things.
Loved to see your insights on process explorer, and other system suits tools.
Thanks for the video Dave. The title kind of confused me as to the subject matter of the video but I am glad I tuned in anyways.
Love your channel Dave!
Thanks Dave enjoyed this , take care.
Nice video! Btw, would you mind to make a video about "Visual Basic 6.0" or the more recent "Visual Studio" products? I still love the old 6.0 and the later 201x versions very much.
@@JB-mm5ff Indeed it was/is! At the time it was really mind blowing. Even today....
It was thoroughly enjoyable listening to you today. You relationship with code is enough like mine that I really heard what you had to say. It has been a long road since the 6502. Longer still since the IBM 1620 where I started. Those days had different challenges. For instance, the local junior college where I had computing privileges while still in junior high had two keypunches, one that printed on the top edge of the globe form 5081 and one that did not. The non-printing keypunch was more available, so I worked at reading the holes in the card (Hollerith) until it became second nature. Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us Dave. :-)
Very great episode. Well done Dave.
hi dave im glad youre not letting your expertise go to waste
25:54 this is a really funny jump cut
It was unintentional! It was supposed to be a censor beep, but something went wrong. Kinda worked, so stuck with the hard cut!
[ diagnosed ASD/Aspergers '13 ]
22:00 - I find the space thing quite on the nose with me, I did a project with a friend that was end-to-end on space, with drawings, timelines and even yogurt pot capsules with parachutes, that took a whole term with a friend. I think that was spring term of '79.
That was really good - thank you
Dave's book on autism Is great. I'm currently in the middle of my third reading. Having just passed my 72nd birthday, I finally understand why I have had so many problems through life. While the book, and other research, hasn't helped too much in getting around my autism, it has allowed me to recognize and understand the issues. Looking back on life, I can now understand many of the times when I went into shutdowns and meltdowns. I just wish I could read as fast as Dave 🙂
I'm going to by the book based partly on your review here. Dave had an autism video a few months back and I related to him some of the characteristics of autism that I have. I am interested in finding out more.
Have you seen the movie "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck? That's the movie that showed me that I have autism as I had many of the same characteristics as the main character. I just thought I was the "slightly odd" guy, even though I have highly functioning autism and social skills. It's worth a watch. I watch it 2 or 3 times a year.
@@BillGreenAZ Thanks for the suggestion. Will try to check it out.
Great video Dave !!!!
I learned C on an Amiga 1000 back in 1985. I started programming for a company on PC's using Turbo Pascal about a year later and it didn't take long to realize how spoiled I was using the Intuition interface on the Amiga. Of course being a Florida Gator the orange and blue interface didn't have anything to do with it :). I enjoy watching your videos. Keep up the good work.
Great video Dave.
When it comes to the 32GB limit, the Nintendo 3DS manual says that is the maximum SD card size, but if you format most 64GB SD cards as FAT32, if they implement SDXC as an oversized SDHC they will be recognized and work on the Nintendo 3DS.
Awesome ep brother
Loved this! Mahalo for taking the time. If you were 18 today, do you think you would take a similar path in life?
Thanks for the insights. I'd love to hear more about what you do now in your personal business now that you're "retired".
Why are you so cool dude
Definitely dealing with Microsoft Windows GUI is currently routinely working out to be more difficult than regular DOS; Microsoft seems to be plagued with rotten Apples 🍏 that just want to shove issues under the carpet; closing threads and cases, rather than fixing issues. Currently routinely plagued by Microsoft Windows GUI update mutilation of Internet functions; a self-destructive activity. Thanks for the update on your activity. And I point out that your work is part of the most useful parts of the Microsoft Windows GUI package. Thanks again Ken Doty.
G'Day.
I have been a fan of Space Cadet Pinball
since discovering it in Windows NT in 1996.
finest virtual presentation of Pinball I've seen.
still my favorite.
i have always had an issue with 3D Space Cadet though ...
when you hit the flipper, the lighting of the roll-over lanes shifts.
the objective being to light up all lanes.
my natural instinct is to drop the light.
have never been able to effectively adapt.
have wondered how difficult it would be to invert the lighting.
i was thinking of an edit with HexEd.
Love your content Dave, it's like listening to a father figure!
Dave, seen a few YT videos lately about whether the products from your MS era (95 & NT) actually included later versions of DOS (7 & 8) that were usable with a bit of extraction from the install files etc. Any comments on this? - might be worth a video?
Thanks for the video all your videos are cool
The idea that understanding the differences between people and the way they do things and the way they can be successfully managed doesn't come as naturally to the neuro-atypical set was a revelation to me.
22:00 You had family and teachers supporting you I think. As a person not having that for much of my live I think those are the things I would needed first and foremost.
Really taxing those Threadrippers and A6000s with those fancy blue star shine cards 😂
Observation #1: Asking interviewees about their "home lab" is a good way to judge the breadth of their interests beyond their current job. That was one of my obligatory questions in interviews for open coder / architect positions. Observation #2: Based on the description of source code / merge work in the 1990s, it's possible that Linus Torvald's biggest contribution to the field of software engineering might not be the Linux kernel, it might be git. Sure, there were predecessors like CVS, Subversion, etc. but the improvements in functionality of git accelerated the pace and scale of platforms that could be created on a distributed basis.
Is there any chance of an audiobook version of your book? I would immediately purchase that if available! Thanks!
I sure hope there will be something special for 640k subs 😉
I saw what you did there!
Are you keen on reviewing some Linux desktop OS's in the future?
If there were a really good desktop that rivaled Windows and MacOS, I would! Got any suggestions, besides Mint?
@@DavesGarageKDE 6 just launched. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is probably the best way to try it. But I'd wait until April or May when Kubuntu 24.04 or Fedora 40 respectively release.
Otherwise Pop OS should be interesting whenever version 24.04 launches (probably sometime in June).
There are a lot of interesting things going on in Linux, most most of them only matter to people already deep into Linux.
@@DavesGarage I'm not the OP, but MX Linux. By FAR. And I recommend that as a former major Windows fan. Has the raw stability, ease of use, and features of old Windows and the devs are in the trenches, so to speak, on their forums, offering support to all users.
I seriously cannot recommend MX Linux enough as a Windows replacement.
Dave,
I just wondered if you ever used Microchip PICs and MPLAB/MPLABX for any embedded projects? Any positive comments? 😊
ChatGPT is able to get a screenshot of a scientific text from a PDF including formulas and is then able to create a markdown text + Latex code from it, which requires understanding what the text is about. It won't make mistakes of getting a + where a t is expected, for instance, which is what an OCR isn't able to do. It's entirely remarkable. I created a GPT for this!
Hey Dave, please do a video on What telemetry is MS collecting, where is it, how to remove it
That was fun.
Hi Dave. You made some very good points but I still want to know what would have happened, in the first 25 years following its introduction, if the original DOS had been written with a flat memory model? Do you think they would have tried to start with a 32-bit model? Would Intel have started with what we call the 80386?
Can you explain how windows scale from 8 cores to 16 and 32 cores? Is 2x cores bringing 50% performance?
What is the longest windows uptime doing a real workload not iddle?
My opinion on CPU intense processes is that we will see a lot of JavaScript Promises being executed in our future, so a CPU that is optimized for asynchronous and looping through JSON will really be the bomb. I can envision a CPU instruction set tailored to this would really rock.
I loooooved BOB
29:12 Wait, so you left Microsoft in 2003 then?
SJB is the king of announcement hype. Every video is basically the Super Bowl.
18:25 Gawd... EDLIN was torture. Absolute torture.
I've got a question for you Dave. Why does windows 10 seem to take a long time to open any application? My laptop takes 3-4 seconds to open putty. My very only Win7 laptop used to open it in a fraction of a second.
@14:22 Clipping sitting on a CRT display in the dash, Aston Martin Lagonda style - As you hurtle into the back of another car, clippy animates and says "You seem to be having a car crash! Do you want me to deploy the Airbags?" Yes/No/Cancel pops up....
What is the correct choice between Abort, Retry or Fail? Thanks.
Absolutely love Task Manager, I always have an instance running and minimised, love to check out the cpu usage and networking usage. Very handy. The start during boot options are great to. Still can't work out why Edge browser is so greedy on resources according to the Task Manager??
I appreciate all the information you share... So, out of curiosity, any insight on either why Win 11 hangs forever when opening any form of a file menu (Save As window, FIle Explorer, etc)? Or why just about any window with any form of "hardware acceleration" (even if you disable the option) if you don't click on the window for awhile it starts to get fuzzy? Examples for me are DIscord, Guilded, and (likely haven't heard of this) Vortex. The text randomly starts getting fuzzy and immediately "corrects" if you click on the window or move something on it. Not a big deal, it just annoys the heck out of me...
25:45 would have been nice to see this full response about him releasing the lock his code.
Cygnus Ed OMG that takes me back to my Amiga Teens
Can you explain why DOS/Windows' driver paradigm is designed the way that it is, in comparison to *NIX driver paradigms, in terms of archetecture, organisation, and efficiencies? 🤔
Is there a way to purchase your book as eBook without DRM so I can use it on a non-amazon reader?
Hi Dave, would be nice a 'Garbage collector vs ARC', with all advantages and downsides of both. Thanks
I was surprised to hear you edit in final cut. I figured you'd be a resolve or premiere kinda guy
Q: What do you think about Mark Russinovich, are you familiar with him in real life? What do you think about his work, books and utilities for windows?
Dave, I wanted to get this in one of your AMAs but couldn't find the timing - do you remember the bug in Windows 98 that allowed you to set focus on the actual Start button (by tabbing for a while), then use the context menu on the keyboard to "Close" the Start button? The button would disappear and explorer became unusable. Do you know how this bug got in there and what caused it?
That was a Feature.
Hi Dave. Q: why was the homegroup feature so bad? Thanks.
subscribed!
Hi Dave, quick question. Why didnt you add search functionality to Task Manager?