NSA Backdoor in Windows? This and more from the guy who created Windows Task Manager!

Why had Microsoft apparently included a key  from the NSA and Windows and what was its   purpose? Had they been forced or coerced by  the Government into including a breaking key   that could reveal everyone's private data?  So I mean 20 year old code that you wrote   is still in Windows today?Yeah the thing that  surprises me the most is that if you minimize   Task Manager you get a little tiny draft  down by the clock. Blue screen of death   why is it blue and is it possible to change the  color? Should I learn Rust because everybody else   is learning Rust or should I learn Go because  everybody's learning to Go or do I just wait   until I need that and it just kind of grew from  there as I was building the Task Manager didn't   even know what it was going to be called Task  Manager yet Windows is 99.9% C and C++ [Music]   Hey everyone it's David Bombal back with a very  special guest Dave welcome. Thank you thanks for   having me. Of course Dave I'm really excited to  you know get you on the channel and I believe   you can give us a quick history about yourself  for people who haven't seen you something to do   with stuff in these boxes right I've got a few  of them behind me as well. Yeah back in the days   when software came on coasters my fingerprints  were on most of them um I started at Microsoft   in MS-DOS and I worked in MS-DOS for a year doing  smart drive and double space and disk copy and a   bunch of the utilities set up things that come  with MS-DOS then I move briefly to the comm Ola   team but I jumped really quick to an opportunity  to join the NT shell team at Microsoft which was   to take all of the Win 95 user interface from 195  rewrite Port it for the 32-bit NT Operating System   and so we spent a number of years doing that where  we just churned through thousands upon thousands   of lines of other people's code which is actually  a really good way to learn the system when you're   trying to get your feet wet that's where we did  a lot of the side projects like Task Manager and   Visual zip and Pinball and things like that that  people may recognize we're generally done in that   era as well and so I worked on that all the way  through XP and Server 2003 so everything from   MS-DOS to server 2003 kind of that time period.  Dave I really want to pick your brains about that   software but I'll say this I started my sort of  MCSE journey with NT 4 so NT 4 is a really special   place for me so thanks so much for you know all  the hard work that you did on that so let's talk   about like NT 4 and Task Manager because I think  that's this a really special story there you've   got a lot of cool stories and actually just before  we start with that just for everyone watching   please go and make sure that you subscribe to  Dave's Channel Dave tell us about your channel   and then tell us about Task Manager. Sure Channel  Dave's Garage it focuses really on two bulk topics   one is programming issues and the other one is  Microsoft history particularly the stuff that   I was involved in so there are a number of topics  that have generally proven proper popular such as   uh Why are blue screens blue and who decided that they  were going to be blue and that kind of thing and I   have a video on Windows Pinball and the evolution  and the history of that and how that got brought   over to Windows and of course we talked about Task  Manager and uh what are those zip folders We have   a video on I believe and then some more esoteric  content like scroll lock, why is it there?what's   it for what's it do? what's it used for today?why  do computers get slower with age and so on. I mean   I've watched a lot of your videos I spent most  of today watching your videos fantastic content   so anyone who's interested in the like sort of  the history of Windows and why decisions were   made or just learning programming highly recommend  that you go and subscribe to Dave's channel one of   the big things you're trying to do Dave is grow  your channel and I love what you said at the end   you're not trying to sell something you haven't  got Patreons you're just trying to get subs and   likes right? Pretty much yeah that's what I  made it for so. So Dave let's talk about how   you started at Microsoft because I they're sort  of like a theme if you like and correct me if I'm   wrong but I've kind of seen this theme where you  write some software and then perhaps on the side   and then it opens doors or something happens. So  yeah that's been a bit of a history for me yeah   um initially I had put myself through college  writing a software package for the Amiga called   Hyper Cache which was to add OS level cache into  the operating system since the Amiga lack that   yeah and then for the summer I was working at  the telephone company doing a 10base-T swap   over of all their network from I guess they were  on UbiNet at something one point and so it was   kind of a grunge grind job you know going  through swapping network cards and drivers   and one day I went down to the food court to  eat my lunch with the old and the board and I   grabbed the book from the bookstore called hard  drive uh hard drive it was the history of making   the making of Microsoft and Bill Gates I believe  yeah so I started reading this book and it was   so quantitatively different from the life I was  leading swapping network cards but the stories   of what these people were working on and how  fascinating was and the fact that billions of   people would eventually wind up running it I  knew that's where I wanted to be but I was in   Saskatchewan going to University at the time so  I decided to go through my registration cards for   Hyper Cache because back in those days there was  no internet yet or there was no web anyway and   people would fill out these cards with their name  and address and you'd mail them when there was   an update to the software so people mailed these  cards in and a few include their email addresses   so I went through and I looked for absolutely  anybody I could find with a microsoft.com email   address and I just cold emailed them saying hi I'm  a programmer in Saskatchewan here's what I've done   and I'd love to work for Microsoft and one guy  named Alistair Banks got back to me and he gave me   probably the the greatest gift you can give to an  aspiring graduate which is the email of a hiring   manager with an open position and that turned out  to be Ben Slivka who did a phone interview with me   for MS-DOS and that's how I wound up being MS-DOS  so it came out and did like the full interview   circuit where it's five or six one-hour interviews  with a lunch interview in between it used to be a   pretty grueling process I don't think they do  it quite that way anymore. Because you wrote   the software on the side and and if I remember  correctly you you actually had a little business   going with that software did that kind of open the  doors for you? Well it got me the job in the sense   that it got me the connection initially and then  when I started at Microsoft I told them I always   have had a hobby of writing software on the side  and we made allowances so that I could continue   doing that as long as it wasn't competitive  with Microsoft and so that became handy as well   basically I was always working on something at  home because I see something interesting in the   shell at work and I'd want to Tinker with it but  you kind of need an opportunity to do that that   works so I would take her at home and one of the  things that was very frustrating about Windows NT   at least in 3.1 the very first version was there  was no Task Manager there was a list of running   Windows and you could end task on them but that  was really it so I started thinking around with   just hey I'll make myself a list of programs and  I'll map that to what processes they are and I'll   go through and see if I can figure out how to  kill a process as it would do under not Linux   at the time but perhaps Unix and it just kind of  grew from there as I was building Task Manager   didn't even know what it was going to be called  task manager yet but I was building it at home and   adding the features and functionality that seemed  obvious and apparent to me that people would need   because I wanted it so I was by and large writing  software for myself and then I took it in and I   was using it at work on my debugging machine and  other developers saw it and so can I have a copy   of that to try it on mine and it kind of spread  around the team until it got to the notice of   some of the higher ups like Dave Cutler and  he seemed to enjoy it as well so he gave me   the dispensation to just he said put on the top  of the start menu well that kind of outraged the   Windows 95 designers because they had this design  aesthetic of simplification and keeping everything   out of your face so sticking it right on top of  the start menu was kind of an affront to them so   I think we moved it down to system tools for the  actual NT 4 release and uh that's where it's lived   ever since. So I mean you were riding this if  I if I remember correctly because you've got a   whole video about this so just for everyone who's  watching if you want to get more detail kind of   have a look at Dave's Channel you wrote this like  at home as a hobby and then then that was actually   incorporated into windows and it's basically the  Task Manager we have today right? Yeah I got it uh   the the stuff I wrote at home was the real basics  the pages and the layout and stuff like that and   then once I was able to bring it internal I was  able to talk directly to the kernel because when   I was linking at home I was linking with Visual C  whereas once you're part of the operating system   you have a little greater access to some of the  internal functions so it actually simplified my   life quite a bit to become an internal project  I think in that case. And I believe I mean let   me see my notes to write you've got some like  interesting names um in the code still well   perhaps till today where it's like Dave's Frame  Window or Dave's controls stuff like that right?   Yeah there are some windows controls that actually  don't paint without flicker so for example a group   box erases its Center and then redraws its  contents and that makes it flicker so I didn't   want that so I came up with Dave's group box when  I was still working very original right yeah I   just stuck my name in front of the real name and  gave it my custom behavior and functionality but   that has stuck apparently because it's one of  those things it's never a good time to go in   and change and there was another example where  there was a process called kill process and that   was the one that would go through and actually end  the process in the kernel and Jim also wanted to   make that recursive so you could say unprocessed  tree and it would kill your process and everything   all the way down so naturally the programmer  that was working on this work item just went   through and replaced process with all children  and so for years and the source code we had   the kill all children function I was gonna say  it's a rather unfortunately named function but   But I mean that's not visible to me as a user  right it's all in the source code? Yeah perhaps   if you had a full internal debug build it would  show up in maybe the symbol table but I'm pretty   sure it makes it uh doesn't make it past the  sanitizing action of the compiler for the public   retail builds anyway. Now I remember in the old  days with uh task manager I mean I started with   Windows well dos and Windows 3.1 was the first  version of Windows that I like had in production   um you mentioned something and I I kind of when  you when you said in your video I remembered   this where you could elevate the privileges of a  process right or and you could kill any process   with task manager but they've kind of like limited  that these days is that right? A little bit so   initially we allowed you to kill absolutely  anything including the win logon process which   would instantly terminate your session and tear  down the machine because you do technically have   the rights to do that if you're an administer  where if something is running in another user   session entirely because NT is a multi-session  multi-headed workstation normally they don't allow   you to kill things in other people's session but  task manager knows it could if you wanted to so so   it just goes ahead and does it for you so you're  limited only by the security and the axles and   everything you have on your account and we found  that journalists were having a great time killing   win log on or bug checking the system by killing  important pieces of the system and saying oh look   how unstable the system is but I mean you can kill  negative nine the wrong thing on Linux two and get   the same results so it's one of those don't do  that things. And it's interesting because when   I've watched some of your videos you always had  a piece and I don't want to get into like the the   Flaming Wars but like Linux versus Windows and I  mean you said something along the lines that you   go immediately into DOS prompt or like Powershell  or something in Windows it's not like you're just   a windows guy you know multiple operating systems  yeah I do most of my development under Linux on   WSL too on Windows and then I spend the other  half of my day probably because I have the YouTube   channel on a Mac in Final Cuts and so on so I I  actually mixed my day almost one third I would say   between the three systems so each one has you know  what they're really good at. Yeah exactly I mean   it's I always find it hilarious when guys like  try and like this is the best operating system   on Earth it's like it just depends on the use case  I find because I use Windows I use Linux and I use   Mac right so are you coding for like is this just  your like your own projects again or when you're   coding in Windows obviously you wouldn't be coding  on Linux or is that what you were doing in back in   the day actually everything I've written in the  last five years is fully compatible that it will   run our Windows Mac or Linux and that's just  been a case of even if we're writing a C sharp   we use the mono framework so that it will again  run on the Mac and Linux so I've tried to keep   all of my code on GitHub building for all three  systems equally. So going back to like when you   started did you code as a child or did was that  that project that you mentioned that got you   that sort of opened the doors at Microsoft was  that the first coding that you did really or how   did you get into it? I was born in 68 so I was  around 10 in 1978 to 80 in that window there and   I happened to walk into a Radio Shack store and  they had a box uh the TRS-80 model one level one   4K the very first one that came out from Radio  Shack and it's a computer on the side and I was   pretty fascinated by that so I asked them can I  use it and they said well it's not set up yet I   said well can I set it up for you and they kind  of laughed at me and said sure kid have a shot   in reality it's not much different than setting  up a component stereo you know that's just cables   one or the other except Tandy and their Infinite  Wisdom back in the day used the same five pin DIN   connector for power video and keyboard so you had  many chances to blow it up but I managed not to   so once I had it up and running they were pretty  impressed by that and they allowed me to ride my   pedal bike down there every Thursday night for  nighttime shopping and I'd spend several hours   on Thursday and sometimes on Saturday um tinkering  away in a TRS-80 model one and I knew absolutely   nothing about it I thought it was a computer so  I was typing English sentences in and getting SN   errors which I thought were spelling but were of  course syntax I just didn't know what syntax was   yet but within a week or two I figured out that  there was a set of commands in basic that you   could use to build basic apps and so I started  coding in basic around 10 I would guess 10 to 12   somewhere in there and then by the time I was 15  or 16 I had tinkered a bit with machine language   on the Commodore 64 and I moved pretty much to  everything in assembly at that point. I said in   those days you were programming in assembly yeah  largely well the first thing I did was a machine   language monitor it didn't have an assembler so it  was literal hex codes and if you wanted to insert   code you had to jump out execute jump back it was  just horrible spaghetti nonsense but it was a good   way to learn the lower levels of the machine.  So I mean what's your advice to people today or   young people who want to get into coding is there  any like or development let's say their dreams to   work for a company like Microsoft do you have  any recommendations of things to do programming   languages you've done the you've been down this  road many many years of experience what you know   what's your advice to younger people or someone  who wants to start out. Yeah my recipe today is   different than it would be 20 years ago I think  today I would focus on being really proficient in   Python not because you're going to write products  in Python but it's just such a functional tool for   what developers do all day long that I think  knowing and being proficient in it is pretty   much essential and then from there you want to be  writing in a language like C++ or even c-sharp I   suppose Java depending on the industry you want  to get into but those will be the big three and   once you've developed proficiency in those I think  if I'm a hiring manager and you're talking to me   my first question is going to be well do you have  any code on GitHub that I can go and look at so   I think contributing to open source projects and  biting off big chunks and doing important pieces   of multiple different projects goes a long way to  show both your ability and your flexibility. Yeah   so in other words it's important to show your  work right and put it on GitHub. Yeah that's   something now I have autism and that's something  that I coach people that have Asperger's and   autism to do which is to sell their work and  not themselves because they may not shine at   the personality level in an interview regardless  of how technical and brilliant they may be so   for some folks and myself included I think it's  easier to focus on what can I actually do for you   as opposed to how wonderful of a person am I not  that they're not wonderful people it just doesn't   come across all the time. I just wanted to say I  mean at the end of the day when you have someone   writing code you're not there you've been in  the games you'd correct me if I'm wrong but   I mean if you want someone to to write good code  that's their job it's their job is not to be like   like a salesperson it's a different type of role  different kind of skill set right? Yeah it very   much is I was somebody who remained an individual  contributor for as long as I could because as I   got in it because I love code and I love coding I  didn't grow up saying I wish I could go to a lot   of meetings so it didn't really push that hard in  my career for that there's sort of an inexorable   draw towards management as you go through any  career I think and the bar is probably a little   lower when you're managing people than trying to  just survive by your own technical merits so it's   an easier path for some folks but I always wanted  the code and so I still code most of the day today   even though I've been retired for 20 years I'm  still sitting in my shopping studio here coding   in C++ because it's what I love to do so yeah.But  you said it offline we didn't record that you've   you you finished at Microsoft 2003 time frame  right? Right I was there until 2003 was when   I left but you're still coding to till today in  other words you've got this love from full coding   since a young age and you haven't stopped?Yeah  after I retired I spent a couple of years doing 3D   graphics and learning everything that I you know  starting kind of where I left off in college and   then building with DirectX and Direct XII through  some fairly complicated graphics just to get my   feet wet and to understand that because it's an  important area and I've done a bunch of database   work again I've done a bunch of work in areas that  I'm not super comfortable in in order to expand my   skill set. I mean what I love about your story and  I mean I want to talk about the zip thing so let's   talk about zip and then I'll come back to like the  career stuff because sure what you've said about   showing your work I mean that's opened so many  doors for you and brought you I don't want to   give it away red things let's leave it at that so  let's talk about the zip episode if you like. Yeah   it's the perfect case where there's absolutely  no personality and only code involved because   I that's something I had written at home and was  selling as a shareware product and just for some   backstory before that you would use command line  tools to unpack a zip and then WinZip would come   out a couple years around the same time maybe a  couple years later but we're looking for a way   or I was looking for a way to learn the new shell  API which allows you to host uh different things   within a shell folder such as you can have control  panel outlets or files or different things to be   hosted in it so I thought what if I was to take  a zip file parse the internal structure and then   expose that as a folder hierarchy that you could  just browse through and grab the file you wanted   it seemed to fit in really well with the new shell  paradigm so I went about writing that and then got   it finished and it was called visual zip I was  selling it as shareware and I was selling maybe a   dozen copies a day something like that at the time  and I was leaving for work one morning and I got a   call from a lady at Microsoft he said are you the  are you Dave Plummer and I said yes and she said   did you write visual zip and I said yes or she  probably called it yeah she's called visualize it   um and I said yes she said ell we'd like to  talk to you about an acquisition of buying it   to include a Windows and we will you know have  you come in and talk about it and I was like   great what building are you in I'll be right over  she's like whoa whoa you gotta talk to Microsoft   legal and travel and all this and I'm just like  totally confused because well I already worked   there why would I have to go to see the legal  department to come to your building and that's   what I figured out neither one of us knew that  she didn't know that I didn't or that I worked   at Microsoft already and she had just cold called  the author of this piece of software to see who   owned it and turned out to be me so uh once it's  your own company that you're negotiating with and   you've got a stipulation clause that you can't  compete with them anyway you're kind of stuck   in a bad position where you take whatever offer  you get and that's kind of what I did so I took   their first only and best offer and I bought a  used 94 Corvette at the time with it so I had   that for a long time and that was my visuals at  mobile. But I mean the story is from what I've   you know sort of the thread through your story  is you love coding and development you you wrote   the stuff on the side and a lot of the tools that  we used today exists because she did this on the   side and it opened doors for you? Yeah it sure did  open doors for me that's certainly true the fact   or to the extent that other people find the stuff  I've written for myself useful I mean I love that   but it wasn't necessarily an attempt to write  something that everybody would find useful so   much as write something that I really think would  be useful and then luckily other people find it so   as well. Let's go back to like the advice to young  people people who starting out it's like you said   like show your work and I mean I you and I both  on YouTube If you're looking for a video editor I   don't care what your personality is it's like can  you edit right I think you'd show me your work is   it's the same kind of thing if you're putting your  work on GitHub or you're making your products like   you did in selling it that just opens doors  rather than like trying to make a speech or   something especially if you struggle to talk. Right yeah I think uh being able to demonstrate   your technical ability in that market is really  important and you can only get so much across   even on a whiteboard interview you can do pretty  well in a whiteboard interview but many companies   don't do those anymore they just sit and talk for  45 minutes and you're supposed to convince them   that you understand why a C++ class with a virtual  function needs a virtual destructor and it doesn't   come across in that kind of environment I don't  think so if that's what you're good at you're   gonna have to find some way to get that across  and your work is probably the best way. So you   mean another criticism a lot of young people have  is like it was easier in the old days than it is   today and then all the old-timers say well it's  so much easier today what are your thoughts you   know if if I was starting out today is it easier  to get into this now I mean it sounds like in the   old days you had to do assembly and all low-level  stuff it sounds like the past a lot easier today   with Python. Yeah I think it's a different  landscape so back in my day the landscape was   much smaller no one person could understand all of  NT but you could understand the storage manager or   the heat manager or the shell and know that piece  really really well whereas today the system is so   big and so wide the landscape of what is involved  in a PC that you can't know everything about it so   you almost have to specialize I think in my day I  specialized in operating systems because that was   where my fascination was but other people may  find other niches to be active in and the big   thing I think is that you achieve mastery in at  least something as opposed to being a dilettante   and being good at 100 things be good at least one  thing for sure I guess. That's great advice I mean   become an expert in in like you were in Operating  Systems don't try and like do web programming and   windows programming like focus on something  right right that's a question I often have   for other people that are in my position uh is  at what point do you decide to learn something   should I learn Rust because everybody else is  learn and Rust or should I learn Go because   everybody's learning to Go or do I just wait until  I need that and I never know and you know if it's   been around several years yeah I'll go learn Rust  because it's been out five eight if you know your   number of years now but I'm not one of those jump  on the immediate coattails of the coolest thing   because so many things have come and gone in the  last 20 years yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that   I had it on my list here because you mentioned  Python C# C++ maybe Java but you didn't mention   Rust and you didn't mention Golang like you're list still the same or would you say have a look at   Rust today I would definitely look at learning  Rust today especially if I were just starting   out my thought on Rust is that it's great and  it provides you a great level of safety sense   and security that you can also achieve in C++  by not doing silly things um if you don't try   to manage your own memory and strings and all the  other things that are so air prone in C++ and you   use the new C-17 1420 versions of the language  facilities you can avoid stabbing yourself the   way that you used to and so Rust, Rust is one way  to solve that problem but it's not the only way. And should I learn C? I think so I I think you have  I think everybody needs to learn C at some point. And but not use it in production I mean just  just use it to learn or and then go and Go and use   Rust. I think the thing is you will run into it  in your career because the C is so ubiquitous in   the industry that if you get to a chunk of code  and you can't read it it's going to look rather   odd so you should at least be very familiar with C  even if you don't write production code in a daily   or anything. How much of Windows is written in is  it C or what languages is Windows written in? C   or Windows is 99.9% C and C++ and in my day it was  probably 50 50 split between C and C ++ with more   stuff migrating to C++ in fact in the Shell the  shell code is actually kind of fascinating because   it's C++ and it uses comm and Ola but it is not  C++ and it doesn't use commore directly wishes   to say they manually set up their own V tables on  classes and invoke through the jump table because   they don't want to load comm dll they don't want  to load Ola a32 dll and they don't want to load   all these other dependent dlls so they wound  up recreating a lot of the infrastructure in   the Shell to just never have to load any external  code and I think that we removed a lot of that in   NT because I think a lot of that came from the  four megabyte minimum working set of Windows 95.   um they had to do a lot of tricks to run in four  Meg. So yeah I want to talk about the difference   between 95 and NT because I mean that was a huge  shift but just before we get there we're talking   about languages you did a speed test of various  I think it was 100 languages and I think it was   a new language that I'd never heard of Zig or  something that came there was like top top of   the list is that right? Yeah a number of years ago  actually about two years ago I wrote a prime sieve   and then I thought well I'm going to write this in  C++ and I'll write it in C# and I'll   write it in Python and I'll write the exact same  algorithm in all three different languages and   then we'll drag race them and see how it turns  out so there's an episode on that and spoiler   alert Python does not win um the C++ one  did the best but that's probably because that's   where I'm most proficient so I thought what if I  put this up on GitHub and I allow other people to   contribute their code and solutions to it and  pretty soon I started to run away and I had to   find people to help manage the GitHub projects and  I've got Rutger in the Netherlands who does that   for me now and he's been essential because there  are 100 languages with a couple hundred different   solutions or implementations and I gotta confess  that half of these languages I'd never heard of   so if you know 50 languages they're not known for  that if you've heard of 50 languages you're doing   pretty well the other 50 were all uh new to me  I would say or if not half many of them so we   did all 100 and we have an automated system  that every day goes through it builds every   solution builds a Docker container for each  one test the solution and ranks and scores it   puts in a database and so we've had pretty good  handle on the performance trends for a while and   Rust and Zig both overtook C++ in recent  months and I believe Go is right up there as well   but uh Zig is definitely for some reason the  fastest and I've looked at it a bit I can tell   that the language seems to provide some level of  facility for multi-threading within it as opposed   to making the programmer do everything manually  like you do in C++ largely so I think that's   giving them a leg up but I haven't decided if the  compiler itself is smarter or what's causing it   but the numbers don't lie so for now Zig is  the fastest. But I think RedOx Rust was two is   all right? I think Rust is number two and then C++ was three. YouTube's interesting places   I mean you know this because you you've got a huge  Channel and you get crazy amount of views which is   fantastic to see people will like say bad things  about Python I mean you mentioned Python didn't   come first because it's a slow language would you  say if I'm starting out Learn Python and focus on   getting good at that rather than trying to get  like the most efficient code I mean you can you   can use the more efficient languages later. Yeah  I think that premature optimization is one of   the great evils of software uh people tend to try  to make things fast before they make them right   then it gets just worse and worse and worse so I  wouldn't write anything that was super perform a   sensitive in Python but the last Python script  I wrote was to be able to grab a YouTube video   take the frames as they come off scale them down  to 64 by 32 Wi-Fi them over to a matrix and draw   them on a display and it was less than a page of  code and it ran at full 60 frames a second so what   more do you really want to ask of a language if  you need more speed like C++ let's hope   you're doing some very fine grain things that are  called an awful lot because for most things Python   will get you 95 of the way there I think. I'm glad  you said that I mean if you're riding kernel level   stuff like you were operating level stuff that's  a totally different ball game but for most of us   you know we're starting with applications like  that was a use case that you found really useful   for Python so I think I always recommend start  with Python and I'm glad to hear you saying the   same thing. Yeah the number of cases where you  need to be in there counting actual machine   cycle or machine cycles like we used to is pretty  uncommon if you're writing again the heat manager   or a thread schedule or something like that that  is called millions of times per second then it's   essential but if you're writing a piece of code  that's going to be called once and you just need   the results it's probably fast enough yeah. So  I mean you need to focus on writing your code   right rather than trying to get it optimized  because I mean if you write it badly it doesn't   matter how good the optimization is right?Yeah  so a lot of that comes from doing it right the   first time which you can't do because programmers  generally write a really terrible version for the   first version because they don't know what they're  doing they don't know what they don't know yet and   then they come along and they write the second  version where they have a dangerous level of   knowledge where they make it super complicated and  over engineer it and then they come back the third   time and they write it like they should have the  first time but it usually takes three iterations   to get something really well done I think. So  let's talk let's switch to like 95 versus NT   I mean that was a massive change so can you give  us a bit of like insider stories just everyone is   watching Dave's got a whole bunch of these insider  stories and we've kind of like spoken a few about   a few of them but tell us a bit about the stories  of like 95 versus NT and how it changed? So in late   94 95 before this before Win 95 had shipped there  was an effort amongst some Rebels at Microsoft   to take the Windows 95 code and put it on NT  and the reason that was rebellious is that NT   already had a user interface plan for Cairo and  it was completely different I had folder hangers   and it had some features the Windows 95 didn't  and it lacked it was just different Cairo is a   long way away so at some point somebody made up  T-shirts for Microsoft Tukwila which for context   is probably 30 miles from here the the joke being  we know where it is and we can get there from here   and so that became the internal code name and the  push was to take all of the code that gave you the   user experience Win 95 and adapted for NT now  some of that is really easy because it's both the   win32 API so a lot of the code just translates  directly the problem the biggest problem is that   Windows NT is fully Unicode so it has to support  the Asian character sets the Middle East and right   to left reading and everything in the base system  so that means 16-bit characters and when you're   a programmer if you've been writing in C you've  probably been assuming for your entire life that   a character is one bite and all of a sudden it's  not and so every line of code that ever made that   assumption assumption or that a Buffer's length  is equal to the number of characters times one   for the number of bytes that's also wrong size ups  are also wrong so there's just a ton of code is   all of a sudden wrong you can catch a certain  amount of that with automated tools but bulk   of it was going through line by line and reading  every piece of code and seeing what it was doing   and where the assumptions were wrong and broken  again as I mentioned earlier it's a great way to   learn code because you're going to look at every  line of the system by the time you're done and   it probably took us a solid year to get it to  the point where it was running well in Unicode   there was an initial boot where we did it in ANSI  but had everything working on NT but of course we   can't ship that because it's English only and NT  is an International System but it was sort of the   first foothold getting it working in English the  compatibility was really tough because imagine on   disk you have a shortcut file for Win 95 it's got  all this information packed in there about the   path and all that but it's antsy so when Windows  NT has given one of these it can parse it using   the official format but when it goes to if you  rename the file and then throw a kanji character   in the middle of the name what's it going to  do with it and it winds up having to store   everything in a way that is invisible to Windows  95 but present for Windows NT systems and yet   Windows 95 will preserve and take that information  payload around with it so it gets fairly common   complicated to do this in a way that's totally  backwards compatible with almost no help from the   backwards compatible system because they were not  you know they were on a death march to get this   thing out the door they weren't going to make a  bunch of changes to make our lives easier so they   just shipped what they shipped to get it working  for Win 95 and we had to adapt it from there. I mean   in today's world we've got Windows 11 at the time  of this recording a lot of what you and the team   developed in those days either is part of Windows  11 today or it's like an iteration of that is that   fair to say I mean the original uh histories from  NT. Yeah I would bet that 80 to 90 percent of the   Shell Code that we rode for NT4 is still in there  and they've built on top of that of course to add   new features and functionality but Plumbing is all  the same underneath so. And how many years ago is   that? 20 at this point so I mean 20 year old code  that you wrote is still in Windows today?Yeah the   thing that surprises me the most is that if you  minimize task manager you get a little tiny draft   down by the clock and it's 10 frames you know  10% 20% 30% and so on up to 100 and I drew those in   the visual studio 2.0 resource editor in 1993 and  they're identical and they haven't changed so it's   the last Vestige of any well I guess except for  the format dialogue it's the last UI that I wrote   or that I designed quote unquote designed that's  still in the system so that's met and I mean   task manager is is still similar very similar to  what you did all those years ago yeah the code is   largely the same and they've added a new page uh  for the GPU and sort of that sort of type of thing   where as they add functionality but the basic  thing is still there and it just built on top   of so I'm rather fortunate to have code in there  that's over 20 years old they haven't thrown away   and started again yet it seems so. But I mean it  just shows you how good the system was I mean I'm   assuming there's a lot of politics in those days  between the Windows 95 team and the NT team. There   was I was kind of isolated from that because I was  just an angry code monkey just writing code and   um fortunately insulated from most of the  back and forth politics but you can imagine   that we're taking their code and we're saying oh  this is nonsense look at all these assumptions you   made and we got to fix it and make it right then  we'll check it into our tree and we'll give it   back to you when we're done so you can use it that  message may not come across if it's not delivered   carefully. So Dave I mean I love hearing stories  um especially you know this stuff still affects   so many of us today have you got any other cool  and interesting stories or just like outrageous   stories that you can share? Well there's one that  I wasn't going to share but somebody else shared   it for me a couple years ago and that is I did  Windows product activation it was the last thing   I worked on it was my last major project so  that's when you enter your CD key and it does   the back end connection and the hardware ID and  does all the enforcement and we really did try   to make it as nice and pleasant for the user as  possible but there's a case where you have an OEM   key and this key is intended to say only work on  a Dell Latitude from 1997 and so what you do is   you encode a digital signature for those strings  in the system bios where they appear but for that   payload to be small if we're only if you buy it  you can upload that to use net and other people   could download it at the time and they would a  hole through activation so to make it hard to do   that I made the file I think it was 10 megabytes  which in those days took a long time it took like   10 hours to download 10 megabytes over a modem so  um I figured that would slow people enough that   it would be a hurdle to piracy and it's a 650 Meg  CD so it's not really taking up any room on the CD   because we had lost spare at that time but what to  put in the file I wanted to make sure that it was   non-compressible so you couldn't just archive it  and transmit it easily and I wanted to make sure   it was nonsense and encrypted so I started with  a set of disk images that I found on our product   server which happened to be Microsoft BoB so I  took the six or seven or eight floppies whatever   it is for Bob and I packed them all together and  I encrypted them with a couple different formats   I think truecrypt was popular popular at the time  and we used uh the internal encryption as well   and finally went up with this 10 megabytes of goo  and it has shipped on every CD of every Microsoft   XP and some of the subsequent operating systems  as this payload that follows a round activation   keys and nobody knew it was actually Microsoft Bob  except when I was leaving the company I figured   I gotta tell one person because if they ever  have to fix this or undo it there's got to be   somebody who's got to know this so I told Raymond  Chen and uh I saw a blog post a couple years from   him about it so that secret's out of the bag but  uh I probably shipped a lot more copies of Bob   than they ever did I would imagine. That's funny I  mean I just like looking at this from the outside   you must be loved for task manager and you must  be hated for Windows activation. Yeah probably   um I mean even my mom doesn't like activation and  she's my mom so what are you gonna do but uh we   really did try to make it as flexible as possible  particularly in things like the hardware ID so if   you go and get a new GPU and you put that in your  system you're not suddenly inactivated we look at   it and we say well same amount of RAM same CPU  same amount of hard disk space same number of   drives it's probably the same machine so there's  a lot of cases where the system says it's probably   all right or if you go to activate it the third  time and it's only been 2 years it's probably   all right so they build a lot of leniency into the  system we tried to make it so that all the policy   would be effective on the back end so the system  was always fully secure and locked down but the   back end could be as gracious as it wanted down  to the level of just saying activate everybody   for free if they ever had to so we gave them the  flexibility I think the really painful part of   activation was if you had to phone it in read your  CD key into a automated voice system or punch it   in with a T9 I think that experience was terrible  but fortunately very few people are in that boat   where they have a completely disconnected system  that they can't get any kind of connectivity to so   hopefully that painful case is sufficiently rare.  Yeah I mean it's I understand why you had to do   it you've made a video on your channel where you  talk about open source and I mean I'll just throw   this in as like in like something hopefully  won't make too many people upset but you said   something along the lines that open source like  Linux has closed parts to it and I don't think a   lot of people realize that. Yeah I took a lot of  heat for that one there was some pretty tense I   can imagine yeah I can imagine Reddit threads my  point was that in a system like Linux even if 99   of it is open sourced and readable if the system  ships with closed binaries that run in ring zero   and you don't know what those do or if they run  on a driver or they run in a chip and an expansion   card and you're just giving an opaque driver for  it well it doesn't matter how much code there is   that's closed if there's any code that's closed  that runs privileged then it's not a fully open   source system now the one thing I didn't say is  that there are fully open source versions of Linux   I think mint is one and if you're careful but  unfortunately those aren't the distributions that   people actually run they run Ubuntu and it comes  down with opaque driver sets and it was really   more a philosophical argument than any assertion  that I thought there was anything nefarious in   the closed drivers but from a philosophical  perspective they're both closed systems to an   extent so. And I mean it's only in the recent day  well it's only like I think was last week Red Hat   changed things so I mean there's a whole blow  up about Red Hat anyway at the moment something   you also said which maybe people don't like it  but people assume because it's open source all   the codes going to be looked at but you made this  point which I thought was really interesting that   just because the code is open source doesn't  mean that someone with the expertise is going to   look at all the code right? Yeah having a million  people look at your heat manager is not as good as   having 4 people that are really qualified to be  writing heat managers so it's really about who's   looking at your code who's writing it who's fixing  it who's debugging it and who's being diligent   about it and that can vary entirely by process and  I I don't mean to imply that Linux is anything but   well managed and well engineered but it's not a  guarantee just because it's open source because   it's the eyeballs that are looking at the code  that are important and not the number of them. I mean just recently it's again in the last few  days is this huge vulnerabilities in Linux so just   because it's open source doesn't mean it's not  going to have vulnerabilities and be able to be   hacked for that reason that you mentioned on other  reasons? yeah vulnerabilities do come up and you   can ask the question well everybody saw this code  there were millions of people looking at this code   and nobody saw it so that's kind of the example of  why it's not a guarantee by any stretch. So let's   talk about security because a lot of people watch  my channel into security it's and cyber um there   was you did this interesting video about the NSA  there was some like code or like key in the in   Windows that was called NSA something and then  a lot of people assume that the NSA had backdoor   access. Long story short no the NSA did not  give Microsoft a backdoor key to break into Windows   and I've seen the code and it's all right I'll  tell them I'll tell them no I'm just kidding um well it's really unfortunately named it's the  fact that you've got a grid inside the code   base called the NSA key that you have to explain  away in later years and that's really the jackpot   there it's not that it's doing anything everybody  I'm sure educational institutions have access to   the NT code and there are other groups that  have access to the NT code so if there were a   back door and it were that transparent it would  be obvious and well known at this point. So Dave   have you have you got any examples of where  someone snuck something into the Windows code   or did something perhaps nefarious was a joke  yeah. I don't know of any examples of that I do   know of one example in MS-DOS where an intern  put a secret message in MS-DOS but that's the   only and it was caught before it got in so I've  never seen any nefarious code get snuck into it   and everything is pretty well scrutinized by  the time it gets into the main source tree not   that it's impossible it's just that it's never  happened to my knowledge and it wasn't something   that I think a lot of people thought about so if  you can put your initials maybe in something I   I've seen that kind of level of vanity and when  it comes to operating systems and I've done that   myself where you need to come up with a signature  well DP works as well as zero seven forty four so   why not but in terms of nefarious code no I've  never seen anything really. For years Windows has   had these Easter eggs right so could you explain  what an Easter egg is and give us an example where   I think your name is in one of these. Yeah it's  in a couple uh Easter egg is basically a code   feature left in that traditionally displays the  names of the programmers and engineers and people   that contributed to the Operating System they go back I believe well back to the 60s if you look hard enough but in modern software the game  adventure from activation I believe there was a   secret room that you could run into and if you put  your guy over a particular pixel a message would   pop up telling you who the original programmer  was and so that's one of the very first Easter   eggs the ones that are in windows are generally  there with wide knowledge and by the time they   make it to the operating system implicit consent  from the op from the management that it's okay   so there's no secret Easter eggs but they are  generally hidden and the real requirement for an   Easter egg are look it can't slow down the system  it can't take up RAM it can't take up disk space   and to any measurable extent so you have to encode  your vanity well I guess because they don't want   something it was an example and I don't want  to slam on it because it's not my team but I   think Excel shipped with like an entire doom game  inside of it where if you did something. I was just   thinking about that there was I remember there was  a game in in one of the products I can't remember   which one. As far as I know I think you had to  use the CD to load it so that it wasn't taking   up your hard disk working space but uh it got a  bad rep for being a large thing within the app and   everybody's like well excel's got Doom built in  no wonder excel's so big the only case I've seen   where anything untoward was put in was an intern  when I was working in 93 he was actually in my   office and they called me later and asked what I  knew about it which was fortunately nothing but   um an intern had added a command switch to  the copy command in MS-DOS that would display   a message about uh I heart and then sex and if  you entered in the right command you could get   to generate this over and over and over so I  guess he thought it was clever and funny but   they caught it longer before it actually got into  the actual source tree so because everything goes   through several layers of scrutiny before it's  built into the main product so. One cool other   project you worked on was Pinball right you  got Pinball into Windows there was a reason   for doing that and perhaps you can talk about you  know the Pinball development that you worked on.  Sure Pinball was a product that was actually  developed by a company called cinematronics I   believe and radiator acquired by Maxis and then  it was licensed by Microsoft to put in the Plus   Pack but of course that only run Win 95. there was  an effort in NT to try to show them hey we're cool   too we can run games and so the vice president  decided well we got to have something flashy in   the box and Solitaire is just not cutting it for  me so what about that Pinball game they ship in   the Plus Pack so my manager came to my office and  said hey how do you feel about working on Pinball   for a few months and that had been a long time  since I worked on a game so I was actually kind   of stoked about it problem with it is a lot of  it was still an x86 Assembly Language and I still   needed it to run on mips Alpha power PC and the  Intel box so anything that was written in Assembly   was an entire rewrite but I was able to save all  the game logic and and the Arts and the assets   and the game design and get those translated over  to work on NT there was another issue in that I   think Win 95 had early DirectX support and we were  stuck with Win G or create dib section the drawing   mechanism was different so I wrote a wrapper  layer that would intercept the Pinball calls   and then draw them using NTS facilities and  it all works pretty well so the game wound up   shipping in Windows NT 4 I believe was the first  time we shipped it and then it shipped all the   way through XP the problem came for them when they  added 64-bit support for some reason on one of the   systems and I think it might have been the alpha  or the ia64 I'm not sure which but the ball would   go through the paddle only on 64 bits and only  on this one architecture if it were all 32-bit   or all 64-bit architectures it's probably an easy  bug to find but when it only happens on one CPU uh   it proved pretty challenging so they were working  on it for a long time we got brought in all these   other sets of eyeballs trying to figure out what  was going on and Rick couldn't get a solution in   time and he had about 50 other things that he  had to port to so just and the reality of the   schedule was there's not going to be time to make  Pinball work on all platforms and the thing about   Microsoft and the way they ship Windows is it  pretty much has to work on all platforms or you   can't ship it so I can't put a Intel pinball game  in the alpha or the mips box and say run into the   emulator we didn't have time to Port it for you so  because they never take that approach the code has   to work everywhere or nowhere and it didn't work  everywhere so it came out for whatever release I   was where they finally pulled it this day. I mean  Dave it must be amazing that you've written this   stuff such as so many years ago and it's still  being used today I mean what what's that feeling   like to see it still out there.Well it's it's  really fortunate that I had the opportunity   to work on things that people know very well it's  even more fortunate that some of these things have   gone on to have fairly long histories like Task  Manager and Pinball hasn't been in the product   but everybody still remembers it knows it and  remembers the sound effects and the music so it's   been really nice to work on stuff that people at  least can recognize so if I was working on Missile   guidance or something it would be much harder to  explain what you do all day than to say well yeah   Task Manager I wrote that or Pinball you've played  that I worked on that that kind of thing so it's   nice to have a few common touch points because a  lot of the stuff I did right was you know doing   ref counts down in the calm plumbing and stuff  like that that you don't see so you know. I just   while you're talking about this I thought about  you did start the start menu as well you were you   were heavily involved in the in in the studman  NT as well yeah that was part of the show that   we were reporting and one of the first challenges  we've faced with it was that it said Windows 95 on   the side banner of the start menu and that was  because Windows can't draw text sideways they   actually had to create a graphic in Photoshop or  paint shop or whatever they were using and then   rotate it and they would blid it onto the screen  as a graphic well there were two problems the   biggest of which was we had to ship Windows NT  workstation server Advanced server and then there   were 64-bit and 32-bit variants and they would all  say something slightly different on the start menu   so now you've got at least six different bitmaps  per language and now you've got probably 12   languages and 72-bit maps it gets pretty unwieldy  pretty quickly so I decided let's see if we can   rotate the whole thing and I use the NT drawing  calls to rotate a device context and then render   Windows NT in the correct font up the side and  draw the gradient behind it and all that's done   live as opposed to Win 95 or with just a snapshot  but it allows you to have it say or do whatever   you want. Amazing so it's like Task Manager is  like the one that I think a lot of people would   recognize because it's software that we've all oh  well I think anyone who's really used Windows as   unless it's perhaps my mother or someone is not  really technical has used and found really really   useful but you've also done like other stuff like  the um the zip thing as people just use it today   without even thinking about it but I think you  were also involved in calculator and clock is  that right? I own calculator for a while and that's when  we did the switch to infinite precision math so   we purchased or license the library that instead  of just using IEEE floating point in the actual   calculations you could have infinite precision  math and it's a lot of pressure you don't want   to be the guy that broke calc and had calculator  give the wrong answer because you can imagine the   Press would just it was bad enough with a Pentium  bug in the day so if you had calculator given the   wrong answer a lot of pressure to make sure all  the answers still came out right let's say that I   never never actually worked on the clock but the  NT clock was unique in that it was a circle and   you could double click on any of the dead space  and it would remove the frame and give you this   little floating widget that you could drag around  the desktop so I thought well what a great idea   I'll do that in task manager and if you double  click any dead space in Task Manager it removes   all the UI and you just get the graphs my intent  was now you you can park that little graph up in   the corner of your screen and have a CPU graph  but I think 90% of people that ever   accidentally did that were suddenly confused by  word and my task manager go and what is this and   how do I fix it so I think it's still in there but  uh not the best feature I ever added yeah. But I   mean I just think it's it's amazing to be able to  talk to someone like you who he's touched millions   of lives with the code that you've written and  to hear the stories and hear that I think it's   a huge inspiration for a lot of people that a lot  of this stuff you did on the side and then it was   something useful and either Microsoft bought it  or it just made its way into the Windows that we   know today. Yeah I seem to have a good knack for  knowing what it was that I thought was missing   and that I could go and patch a hole in the system  and say this is an area where I wish it had this   functionality I'll just go home and write it and  then that doesn't know I mean I've got a source   folder on my machine with 200 300 projects that  never went anywhere as well but obviously there   are some that have gained traction and so I'm very  lucky in that regard. Now I love that I think it's   an inspiration for anyone I mean I've written some  code nowhere near obviously what you've done but   I've I've written some code that was useful for  me and then it became useful for other people. yeah I think this might sound a little grandiose  but one of the things that's cool to me is because   I have an intimate knowledge of how the machinery  of Task Manager Works how the message pumps works   and how the pages are laid out and what the code  does and I know that there are at any point up to   a billion of them out there installed in the use  so I know that in my head I've got this little   machine I built and now there's a billion copies  of it out there all running the same way and that   feels really cool and it's not a popularity thing  it's a I made a machine and now there's a whole   bunch of these machines doing lots of work around  the world for some reason that's fascinating to   me. I think it's amazing I mean it's the same  on YouTube like the video that that you   did on Task Manager when I looked today is like  1.2 million views that's over a million people   have watched your story about Task Manager it's  fantastic. Yeah it's a lot of Carnegie Halls if you   fill them up one at a time but it's it depends how  you think about it I guess. So I want to ask you   about this you mentioned it right in the beginning  blue screen of death um why is it blue and is it   possible to change the color? It is possible to  change the color, there are red screens of death   and green screens of death the reason it is blue I  don't really give away the entire thing I'll tell   you the reasons why it's not blue my assumption  was that when we would have labs in the machine   they'd all be black text or white backgrounds but  if they were in text mode or in Windows mode and   so if you walked into a lab of 50 PCS and one of  them was crashed well the fact that it's the one   with the big blue screen makes it really obvious  and so I think somebody had told me that and I   always assumed that was true but I know the guy  who wrote the original crash dump code John Vert   and I worked with them at Windows and so I tracked  him down and I kind of do the detective work of   how did it get to be blue why is it blue and the  answers are non-obvious but it's one of those   things that somebody made a decision you know 30  years ago and then somebody said well I'll do the   same as that guy and the next guy said I'll do  the same as that guy and it became a tradition   basically and I kind of followed that trail back. Just everyone who's watching Dave explains it in   a lot of detail I'll link that video below and  as well as a lot of the other videos that we've   mentioned Dave ChatGPT is taking the world by  storm what do you what's your thoughts about ChatGPT   I know you've done a video on it as well  which I'll link below um is it a good thing   is it a bad thing saying you know what's your  thoughts on ChatGPT? I think it's transformational   for programmers because pretty soon you won't  be able to program without ideally having it   look over your shoulder or tell you where to  start because so much of when you're writing   code is you could write that from scratch ideally  you would take it from a library but if you had   something you had to write from scratch I think  starting with a ChatGPT framework and asking it   to give me the rough code and then fill it out  from there is a lot more productive than writing   all the boilerplate yourself so for boilerplate  Stuff chat gbt is great and then once you've got   your code already figured out and working or not  working in this case perhaps uh you can find feed   your code back in at ChatGPT and say where's my  bug and quite often it can spot the fault in your   logic or in your implementation and it really  shortcuts some of the development process that   I think everybody's going to need to know and  use it it's not that programmers are going to   be extinct and you're just going to ask ChatGPT to write an app because it's the complexity and   the interaction and the synchronization between  parts of code that's where you make your money   as a programmer it's not writing hello world so  it can do the easy work while you're doing the   fun and cool stuff I think yeah. I love that  because I mean that's the concern people are   saying that ChatGPT is going to replace all of us and  uh developers are going to be replaced or coders   are going to be replaced with ChatGPT but you  don't think that's gonna? No I think GPS will have   a huge impact on London tax taxi drivers but it's  not going to replace the taxi or obviate the taxi   they'll still need good drivers. And I love that  because it's a it's an encouragement for everyone   who's for the young people starting because I get  this question a lot like should I get into cyber   security should I get into Dev because I mean  there's going to be no jobs but it's good to hear   that you you see it as an enabler or a tool rather  than a replacement for absolutely I would say if   you were doing a job that can be replaced by ChatGPT at this point you're probably doing a job that   you don't want to do for the rest of your life  anyway because it was probably a little mundane   and predictable the real cutting edge stuff is  not coming out of ChatGPT so. And I mean the   other issue a lot of people have raised with ChatGPT is the code that it creates is bad code as   in it's got like vulnerabilities or doesn't use  the you know best. 3.5 was quite bad 4.0 I'm   actually fairly impressed with with how it can do  it but I still do get things where I look at the   code and I'm like wait a minute and then I ask it  are you sure you met this because this can only   hold eight bits and it goes oh yeah I forgot about  that and then it goes back and fixes it which is a   little frustrating why didn't you do that without  me asking but uh hopefully they will improve that   to the point where you don't have to interrogate  it quite as hard. It's been fascinating to you know   go through your videos on your channel what's  your plans with your channel live what do you   what kind of content are we going to be seeing  you know coming to the channel? I think a lot   of the same focus on Microsoft history there's  only so much stuff that I touch so only so many   stories to tell but occasionally I think of a new  one and throw it out there is a new episode a lot   of programming topics and we're doing a lot of  addressable LED and Matrix LED coding we've got   a mesmerizer project that is a desktop display  that does audio graphs it's a fireplace it's a   stock Decker it does sports scores that kind of  thing so we've been having a lot of fun with that   and that's an open source project that people  have been contributing to since I did a video   on that about a month ago. So Dave your channel  is amazing I've spent a lot of today like I said   watching it and I have seen on bunch of videos in  the past highly recommend that all of you who are   watching go and subscribe to Dave's Channel you  can learn so much and it's not just history it's   also about coding best practices a whole bunch of  stuff that that you can go and learn but Dave what   apart from your YouTube channel do you can you  share any things that you're going to be doing and   I believe you're going to a conference or you're  doing something any other like places people can   perhaps meet you or you know? VCF West in Mountain  View I believe it's August 4th and 5th I'll be   speaking there and I'll be on the speakers panel  as well with Adrian Black and a few other people   so that should be an interesting time I encourage  anybody in the area to come check it out say hello.  That's brilliant Dave thanks so much for sharing  you know your knowledge and experience of   this especially the thing about ChatGPT and you  know AI replacing developers and like encouraging   people who are you know who are starting their  careers I mean I mean it's amazing to be able to   talk to you I a lot of us have used the products  that you've created um so thanks so much for   creating those things even you know doing it as  a side project then suddenly became something   useful in the windows kernel or you know the  Windows operating system have a great day [Music]

Channel: David Bombal

Views: 442,353

Keywords: task manager, windows task manager, microsoft windows, source code, how to, windows xp, windows 10, windows 95, operating system, windows 8, windows 11, task manager windows 11, history documentary, windows tips, dave plummer, windows nt, windows 98, zip, unzip, winzip, pinball, nt, nsa, windows nsa, windows backdoor, windows zip, rust, python, golang, best language, best computer language

Id: HYzbihjcbLs

Length: 53min 11sec (3191 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023