Hey, I'm Dave welcome to my shop! I'm Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems
engineer from Microsoft going all the back to the Windows 95 and MS-DOS days, and today
I'm going to tell you the Secret History of Microsoft Gary. Gary was aa dude down the hall from me who
did likely did more than any human being since Guttenberg to democratize access to the printing
press. I also want to make you aware of an upcoming
livestream on Sunday night and to get your suggestions for an upcoming interview. All that and more this time in Dave's Garage. Before we talk about Gary, I wanted to let
you know that I'm planning to do a Windows War Stories livestream and I'd like to encourage
you to join me. It's my first one and I'd be sad if no one
turned up, so do me a solid and stop on by. We'll be getting together at 7PM PST Sunday
night, which is 10PM Eastern, on the 24th of January, right here on the Dave's Garage
channel. I'll be available for your questions and I'd
like to pick your brains for ideas on upcoming episodes for the series. I'm also excited to announce that I'll be
having a special guest on an upcoming episode, a former Vice President of Human Resources
at Microsoft. To that end I'd like to find out what questions
you might have about interviewing, hiring, firing, stock options, reviews, and more - really
anything related to HR. Please leave me a comment on this video with
your suggestions, and of course there's no better way to get your question heard than
to stop by that livestream on Sunday night! And now, I want to talk about a guy named
Gary down the hall from me. Gary started a while after me, in 1997, I
think. I believe we were in building 25 or 26 at
the time, and I'd heard that Gary was an expert in something to do with color science and
had a bunch of patents, but a lot of the people around me were experts at one thing or another,
and the NT team was so full of industry veterans that most everybody had a dozen patents it
seemed. Heck, even I've got a half dozen. But for most people if you are lucky enough
to get exposed to even a few experts now and then during your life, you're doing pretty
good. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a ton
of them. I mean three doors in the other direction
was Raymond Chen. That's like saying Google you lived three
doors down from Google, because either way, you can ask them pretty much anything and
they'll know the answer. In multiple languages even. In fact, they seem to know the answer with
such ease that it's easy for it to become a reflex to just ask before even thinking
really very hard, and while Google is eager to show you multiple ad impressions, Raymond
doesn't suffer fools quite as gladly. But "expert" means different things to different
people. On the one hand, you have a lot of self-described
experts in the world, people eager to tell you why they're outstanding in their own fields,
some even oozing expertise and sincerity for the highest bidder as expert witnesses in
almost any field you can imagine. At the other end of the spectrum are people
that truly are the quiet experts in their important fields but who so lack the gene
for self-promotion that their contributions can almost go unheralded or even unknown. I don't know if I had a reputation for this
around the halls of Microsoft, but even if not, I certainly deserved one as a bit of
a "time burglar". By that I mean I tended to work heads down
for hours at a time without talking to anyone and then I wanted 5 or 10 minutes of social
interaction which I would get by wandering by your office and telling you my favorite
and most relevant anecdotes. Probably my favorite victim for this was a
guy named Jon Berry. About three times a week I'd wander into his
office to chat and flip through his magazines, no doubt getting my donut crumbs all over
his copy of Microprocessor Report. I'd sit for a minute and tell him my random
theories and musings on the new Simpsons episode before heading back to my office so that we
could both get some real work done. Jon was also my boss in those days, so I don't
know how smart it was to waste his time like that, but then he knew that that I knew that
he only subscribed to Microprocessor Report for the respect, so we had an understanding. With some people though I know when to shut
up and just listen. Like I have an old friend Jim, a 70-year-old
curmudgeonly Vietnam combat veteran who still runs his own automotive repair and custom
fabrication shop near my home. Going to his shop, which I do at least a couple
times a week, is a little like visiting the Barber shop in the movie Gran Torino. Except there's more lot more profanity and
smoking, and the Playboy centerfolds are hung proudly on the walls rather than hidden away
in the magazines. Jim knows all there is to know about repair
and welding and the fabrication of classic and race cars. And I'm the kind of guy where if you know
a lot about a topic, and if I know that you're a rare resource about a topic and I'm seriously
interested in that topic, as I am with cars, then I will pepper you with questions about
the topic whenever we're together until I'm sure you've told me all there is to know about
the topic or until it becomes obvious to me that it's time to stop, or worst case, until
you will just no longer talk to me any further. If you're thinking that behavior sounds a
little on the Spectrum, I once speculated to Jim that I thought I might be a little
Autistic. His response? Just a little, huh? The other guy that's always been around the
shop has been Rick, and I don't actually have a picture of Rick, but thanks to a little
prosopagnosia, to me he looks exactly like Wilford Brimley, so you might as well just
go ahead and picture him as Wilford Brimley, except working on an engine dyno. That's because Rick used to be a Winston cup
engine builder for a famous NASCAR racing team down South before he retired up to my
area to putter on the engine dyno at Jim's shop and build engines in the back room. Now between Jim and Rick, they've got three
eyes, one pancreas, and more types of different cancers than ten men should really have. And while Jim is well and still plugs away
all day in the shop, between Cancer and Covid I haven't seen much of Rick in a long time. The 427 big block he hand-built for my 2+2
that I'm restoring may well have been among his last, but one of the highlights was dyno-tuning
the motor with my brother, Rick, Jim, and a guy named Larry Webb. Larry looks like and has the swagger of an
old Paul Newman but he's really there because he spent about 60 years at General Motors
working on carbs and fuel injection and for all I know he literally probably worked on
the design of the Rochester Quadrajet carburetor that my motor actually came equipped with
back then, and Jim just happens to know him. Pretty handy for me! It'd be something like having Eric Clapton
stop by to tune your guitar. When he couldn't find a factory metering rod
that was within a thousandth of an inch of what he felt was needed, he turned his own
on Jim's lathe, right then and there. If you're not sure what that means, just know
that any sufficiently manly task is akin to magic, and it was pretty magical to watch. In the end there are two things you can be
sure of that day: that motor ran balls out on the dyno and was dead nuts to the factory
spec, and I asked that Larry guy a ton of questions about carburetors in the little
time I had with him. I joked earlier that I could wear out my welcome
with questions, but these days I'm self-aware enough to know when to stop bugging people,
or least I hope I am. Larry, the General Motors guy, kind of parachutes
in and does his thing and leaves without a lot of BS or time to chat. Rick, as friendly as he's always been, can
almost seem a little secretive at times but that might just be a vibe he gives off after
years in NASCAR, where winning and losing is everything and secrets protect championships
and endorsements worth millions of dollars. A guy that's long made a living not telling
you anything he knows may not be ready to tell you everything he knows the minute he
retires. Jim, on the other hand, is always willing
to share. Like just last week he was troubleshooting
an old pickup that would fire up but then die immediately after starting with a big
belch back out the intake and carb. He did some troubleshooting to rule out the
obvious before the end of the day but ultimately closed up shop for the day without a solution. He awoke in the middle of the night with a
start, because he suddenly knew the answer: the muffler had rusted which caused the metal
to expand internally and it had therefore become restricted. It was good enough for cranking the engine
over, but once combustion actually started, the sudden backpressure would overwhelm the
intake charge, overpower the piston, reverse the engine's rotation briefly, and hence the
backfire. Secure in the knowledge of what it was, he
fell back asleep and slept solid till morning, when he confirmed his theory was in fact correct. That only happened to me once, in about 1994. I was on the COM/RPC/OLE team, and I'd been
working on the OLE Presentation Cache. That's what does the drawing when, for example,
you have a Word document that contains an Excel chart - you don't want to actually load
and invoke the Excel program to paint it every time you scroll on by, so OLE actually does
it for you, and it supports a number of formats like bitmap and metafile. I was brand new and I was assigned a bunch
of bugs related to adding support for Win32's new Enhanced Metafiles to the Presentation
Cache. I skimmed a few thousand lines of existing
code to get a feel for it, then got to work on a few of the actual bugs. One of them involved elements of the picture
being scaled comically small for some reason in certain weird cases. One night at home I too awoke with a start. I knew where the bug was, and it actually
woke me out of a deep sleep. I think I'd dreamt it and when I saw the bug
in the dream, it somehow woke me. I stumbled to my den and used a variety of
ancient tools. First, I used a "modem" to connect to an "ISP". Then I ran Trumpet Winsock or some such nonsense
to get an IP address, which I then used to connect to a "telnet" proxy at Microsoft campus,
then connected a console window that connected to my work machine, and so on. There were a lot of hoops to jump through,
but (a) it was still 1994 and the web wasn't even really a thing yet, and (b) getting at
the Windows source code with a modem probably should be hard! Regardless, I got at it and jumped right to
the code that I had dreamed contained the bug. Sure enough, in something to do with screen
pixel to HIMETRIC conversion, there truly was an error in the math. It was actually off by a factor of 100. Somehow, I'd suddenly remembered the code,
or delay processed it after having skimmed it earlier, or some such thing. I wasn't going to change the code in the middle
of the night and check it in, I wasn't quite that confident, so I did what we did in 1994,
in a process that would later become verboten: I put a BUGBUG comment in the code and went
back to bed. I too slept like a baby secure in the knowledge
that tomorrow I would start the day with an easy fix teed up, ready to go. When I got to work, I veritably sprinted to
my desk and brought the code up in SlickEdit, as was the style of the day. And sure enough, it was indeed a bug, and
it was off by 100. But if you zoomed out a little bit, you could
see that it was also inside #ifdef MAC. Sadly, it only affected the Macintosh version
of Office, not all of Windows. So, it was A bug but not THE bug I was looking
for. You win some and you lose some. But what does all this have to do with Gary
and asking old guys questions? Well, the thing is I'm older now, and I ask
a lot more questions than I used to. I'm less likely to need to hear myself speak,
as it were, than when I was younger man. And in the case of guys like Rick and Jim,
they're happy to chat because they're not really on the clock, but the people at Microsoft
most definitely were. So as much as I would have liked to, I never
once stopped by Dave Cutler's office just to ask him why we didn't just use Xenix instead
of starting fresh with NT. And if I had, it's not like there would have
been a bunch of young programmers sitting cross-legged on the floor as he regaled them
with stories of his VMS days. We had actual work to do, and it was bad enough
if I wasted a few minutes of your time telling you why what you just said or did reminded
me of some episode of a cartoon and why that's perhaps ironic or meaningful. Perhaps you'll forgive me then, then I tell
you about Gary. Gary was an older fellow on our team. How much older? He was literally of my father's generation,
actually being two years older than my own Dad. Being new to Microsoft he had an interior,
windowless office, since they were normally given out based on seniority. For all appearances he might have been a new
contractor, but it didn't matter either way; he seemed smart enough and was nice enough,
and always cheerful, and so Gary was just the guy a couple of doors down from me. He was on the NT Print team. The NT Print team was a peer to the NT UI
team, which is where I was, and we all reported to the same guy, Leif Pederson. But since we didn't work together on the same
stuff, our only real time together would be at lunch and in the break room, where you
make the same small talk you would at any company. Along the way I learned that he had been at
Apple at some point in the past, and even Pixar. He had a great story about them winning an
actual Oscar, and how he was bummed to find out that he wasn't going to get to accept
it on the red carpet because that's not how they do they technical Oscars. But if you added up all the three-minute private
conversations we had, that's about the highlight of what I learned. Otherwise, we went for lunch as a group and
so on, but people don't really share personal details in a group situation in the same way. After a reorg or office shuffle I didn't see
him much after a while, and then we both retired, and I never saw him again. Then, one day about 20 years later I was walking
by one of my kids who was watching a video on YouTube - Technology Connections or some
such thing. And up pops a picture of a guy that I'm sure
I know, and as you've no doubt guessed, it was Gary. I walked over and asked my son to turn up
the volume, and I learned something new. He had been watching an episode on the invention
the laser printer, and it just so happened that Gary was its inventor. It turned out that Gary wasn't just Gary from
lunch, he was Gary Starkweather, actual inventor of the one and only laser printer. And it turns out Gary wasn't just "at Pixar"
when "Pixar won an Oscar". In fact, he had done pioneering work on color
film scanning for them and for Lucasfilm before them. He must have worked for George Lucas for a
long time, because it turns out that Gary from the hallway was also a digital effects
consultant on the original Star Wars movie in 1977. Yeah, that one. Maybe you've seen it. Gary also won the David Richardson Medal recognizing
his significant contributions to optical engineering back before I'd even dropped out of let alone
gone back to high school, so he was well on his way to a successful career well before
he did things like invent Color Management for the likes of Apple Computer. Because Gary from the break room wasn't just
Gary that used to be at Apple, he was an honest to goodness Apple Fellow, one of the Few. Other little things he'd failed to mention? Oh, like he worked at Xerox Parc, which is
where he did the inventing of the never-mentioned laser printer. But not only did he work there, he was Xerox
Parc employee number 23. And it goes on. Had I known any of this, even had an idea
or an inkling, I'd like to think I would have asked him a lot more questions and hopefully
cajoled him into telling me a lot more stories. It's hard to know, I was a lot younger then. Seeing Gary's photo on YouTube made me nostalgic
and curious about him, so I looked him up, only to find out that he'd passed away about
a year ago, at the age of 81, down in Florida. If you bring up all his pictures in Google
images, he's smiling in every single one of them. That's not that uncommon for photos, perhaps. But I think it's true to reality, since Gary
was smiling pretty much every time that I ever saw him in real life too. Lasers and optics are cool and maybe he was
responsible for the greatest step in democratizing the printing press since Guttenberg, but the
main thing I remember about the person is that Gary was irrepressibly cheerful. Either aspect of the person would be fine,
but I love it when they're combined like that. Suffice to say I wouldn't be hearing any new
stories from Gary, so I figured the least I could do would be to share one of my favorite
old ones that I do know with all of you. As I said, Gary had been a serious guru in
the field of lasers and optics. I now know that he'd been granted something
like 40 patents in the area of the laser printer, and many if not most of them were to do with
the optics. All I knew back then though, is what he said: He was at some big graphics conference or
tradeshow, and he was looking at a fancy new laser printer of some sort that was being
introduced to great fanfare as revolutionary. They were showing off the exciting new technology
inside, which somehow involved a pentaprism... Gary congratulated them on their discovery,
and then noted that he already held the patent on it and had for some time. The guy doing the show about turned white
and almost collapsed on the spot. Pretty soon the Xerox brass and a bunch of
corporate attorneys were involved. They eventually agreed that the new device
likely did transgress on Gary's patent, but the opposing lawyer said that the invention
seemed obvious, and that anyone could have come up with it. That's when Gary delivered one of my favorite
lines: "If it was so damned obvious, why didn't YOU invent?" Turns out he was right, and Xerox made some
money off the infringement. I should add that's nothing new, though. After all, the laser printer generated billions
for Xerox and paid for everything else that Xerox PARC ever did, many times over. Fortunately, this story is also one of the
ones preserved in an oral history that Gary recorded for the Computer History Museum,
and it's available online, as is a written transcript. I could read it aloud to you now, but it's
perhaps best that I just put a link to it and encourage you to have a look or a listen
for yourself. Even if you were to just google his name,
Gary Starkweather, you'd learn some cool stuff. But I'll make it even easier by providing
links in the video description, including a couple on how his invention, the laser printer,
actually works. If you don't already know, it's actually pretty
clever! The moral of the story is pretty obvious,
especially if you're young. If you've got access to people like a Jim,
or a Rick, or a Gary - get them talking and just shut up and listen. Don't bother trying to impress them with your
own exploits. If they're not the chatty type, go ahead and
ask them questions. Most older experts, particularly successful
older people, are actually eager to find a worthy young mind with which to share what
they've learned. All you need to do is appear genuinely interested
and ready to put it to work. Learn everything you can from them, because
there's some folks - like Larry the fuel injection wizard - where the field is such that not
only their legacy but their knowledge kind of lives and dies with them. What they don't share simply because people
don't ask could be lost to the ages. So always be sure to ask a lot of questions. By the way, if you enjoyed this particular
episode but you're not yet subscribed to my channel, I'd be honored if you took a moment
to do so. That'll also let me know I'm going the right
direction with this episode, I'll make more like it, and if you turn on the bell icon,
you'll even be notified of them when I do. It's a win-win. As always, remember I'm not selling anything,
and I don't have any Patreons, I'm just in this for the subs and likes, so if you did
enjoy the episode, please be sure to leave me one of each before going. I'm trying to grow the channel so if there's
somewhere you can share this episode, like an appropriate place to list it on reddit
for a forum, that sort of thing, please do so! It's kind of a niche interest but odds are
if you were interested then you know someone else who's enough like you to be interested
too, so send them a link. And don't forget to head on over to Dave's
Garage at 7PM Pacific, 10PM Eastern, this Sunday, the 24th of January, for my first
ever livestream. The more the merrier, so bring a friend. I'm looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks for joining me here in the shop. In the meantime, and in between time, I hope
to see you next time, here in Dave's Garage.
Gosh I love this channel. Makes me feel so inadequate as a relatively new developer. The level of skill and knowledge on display astounds me