| What is a typical day in your life like? | I get up at 4:30. I watch some YouTube, do some email, work on my writing or similar. I head to the gym at 7, shower and start my day around 8. I work in my home office or shop/lab, code and work on stuff, throughout the day. I could be busy all the way through to 8-9PM if I'm wrapped up in something, but not usually that busy. |
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| You get up at 4:30 AM? Wow. Have you always been a morning person? Are other people on your team morning people so you decided to start early? I’m asking this because it seems like a lot of successful people wake up very early and work out before starting their workday. | No, I never was until my neck injury. While recovering I couldn't sleep more than about 4-5 hours max and just got into the habit. Since it was so productive for me, I just kept it up! |
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| Thanks for sharing. I wish you good health. | Thanks! |
| Did you create Robocopy, or know who did? I use that very regularly and much more efficient than using the GUI. | The secret dirt is that Robocopy was first written by MS colleague Kevin Allen, and he started sharing copies around in 1994ish. From there, and after many iterations and heavy-duty real-world feedback, robocopy ended up in the Windows Resource Kit, and then later merged into the core Windows package. In the beginning, Kevin was a very experienced programmer, but new to the Win32 API; so robocopy was one of his projects to educate himself about Windows programming. Later on, ITG used robocopy to routinely transfer many gigabytes of data around MS global offices, every night; it became very robust and battle-hardened. It is a long time now since Kevin was involved in the robocopy source code at all; it is maintained by the Windows team. |
| Did you create Microsoft Clippy? Will Clippy ever make a come back? | Noooo... but I was around at the time. We have Clippy now in the form of Siri and Google Assistant and Cortana, but there's no picture. That's all it was though, an early digital assistant. |
| I read on a Microsoft devblog that when windows got ported to 64bit pinball 3d was not ported because of bugs and the developers not being able to understand the code/not having enough time. It's a shame, because it was such an awesome game and I spent many hours playing it as a kid. Was the code messy due to being ported from Sam and do you think it could have been ported given enough time and expertise? | Basically what I did when I ported it was to maintain the central code "logic" loop of the game unchanged so that it would play just as it did on other platforms, and then "hooked" functionality coming out of it and going into it. So I rewrote the drawing code that did the actual drawing, but not he original code that wanted to do the drawing, if that makes sense. I changed the how, not why. |
| That meant, though, that at the very core of the game was a big bunch of code that we didn't touch or monkey with, because it 'just worked'. Apparently sometime after Vista, in 64-bit, there was a collision detection bug in Pinball. |
| From what I read, Raymond Chen looked at it and got the general idea of what was wrong but didn't want to touch the fragile old code. Raymond's one of the best debuggers I've met, so it wasn't a question of expertise but of time and resources. |
| Anyone on the team could have trivially fixed it I'm sure, but it sounds like no one "owned" the game anymore after I left, and it was more than just a random little bug to fix, it would have required a dev to be assigned to it, and there likely was no one free. |
| What is your favourite colour please? | Well, I have four cars with blue interiors and I'm wearing a blue shirt and a blue watch and blue jeans. So probably blue. |
| If my son expresses interest in serious computer programming, where is a good place to start? C for Dummies? (I'm joking and I know terribly little about the topic, only enough to know backend is where it's at) | Python, then Javascript. Build a website! |
| Hi! Just wanted to say, I still use MS-DOS regularly, on many of my older machines in my collection. Also Win3.x, Win9x etc How do you feel about computers becoming extremely dependent on 'cloud' services? I can still set up an old machine, install an old OS, install old software and have it all up and running within an hour or so, while modern software essentially requires cloud services for literally everything. What happens to that software once some random person out there decides that they don't want to support it anymore? Those cloud services go away? Are you concerned that future generations will not be able to experience anything from this era of computing? Considering computers were designed to be able to continually run the same software over and over as necessary, how can that apply if the bulk of this is lost when the cloud disappears? Or maybe this isn't a concern at all, and I'm just crazy...? | I already have hardware that refused to work because the cloud service that backs it has been abandoned or the company has gone out of business. |
| I worry that things become dependent on externals that aren't reliable long term, and I know what you mean... but fortunately Windows, once activated, runs perfectly well offline forever, really. |
| I'm a fresh graduate with some experience and reading the knowledge you all have in the comments has made me feel very inferior. I only started coding in my university and I don't do it in my past time. Am I doing something wrong? I do enjoy programming but I try to keep a work life balance. Is that a thing in software development? Also did you ever approve a pull request by Bill? | No, as long as you DO enjoy it when you're doing it, you're fine. There's an entire "spectrum" of people in the world and some of us have "special interests" with which we're a little obsessed, and tend to "hyperfocus". I'm one of those people but it's by no means the only way to do it! |
| I knew many great programmers who (a) didn't program in their spare time at home and (b) didn't continue to program recreationally after leaving it as a job. |
| If you can work regular 40 hours a week as a productive programmer, you'll be set! |
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| Thank you so much for this! Are there any tips you'd like to give to fresh graduates like me? | If you get a job at a large company like Microsoft, and decide you're not happy, try moving INTERNALLY before looking for another job. You could work for 5 different companies over your career and they could all be Google, for example. Culture goes through and through, but every team has its own. |
| the following is a later reply | If you can put in a 35-40 hour week of solid work, you'll be fine. There are three buckets: the obsessives, like myself, who work as much as they can. Then the solid pros, who can turn out a ton of quality stuff in 40 hours. And then you have the slackers who surf Facebook at work and read reddit when they should be coding. As long as you're not in that group you're fine, and a balance is important. It is indeed a thing the successful people achieve it. It's not about how much code you write, it's about how much MORE time you spend coding than you want to, and that should be zero! |
| Lots of people are in careers they don't practice in their free time, in fact most. So it's a bonus if you're that way, but most people are NOT, so don't despair! You're normal! |
| If you're still answering, how much of the original Task Manager still lives in the modern Task Manager? Anyway, thanks for the AMA! You're a legend! | I don't know for sure, but from looking at the app, and not the code, I'd expect about 60-70% of it? |
| Hopefully you’re still taking questions. I get a lot of crap by my peers about command line. Power shell is badass but I’m a cmd guy myself. I know we can do pretty much everything that cmd does in powershell and more, but idk. I like what I like, you know? Where do you stand on this? | Honestly I'd be a CMD guy as well, but I'm really starting to lean towards using bash under WSL. |
| Have you ever looked the help for SET and FOR under CMD? It's where we put every piece of extra functionality, since you can't add keywords that might collide with people's script names, etc... |
| I didn’t use windows after windows 7 for about 5 years. Back in august 2019 I finally rebuilt and upgraded my old PC and installed windows 10. The task manager in windows 10 is so amazing and powerful. I would imagine it’s something you wanted to implement in the 90s but didn’t have the tools or time. Right? | Indeed, I'm a big fan of the current task manager and what they've done with it! I wish there was a Dark mode, I wish it handled file lock tracking, and I've always got wish lists, but they've done a great job with it! |
| CIA_grade_LSD: Why does the file transfer time remaining progress bar start at like 15 hours and then drop to two minutes and then stick at 99% for five minutes? (An exaggeration I admit. I know you and your colleagues do your best, but I am curious why this hasnt gotten much more accurate over the years.) androidethic: Yes, we need a justification as to why the windows file operation estimations are so random/inaccurate! | They're the worst estimate out there, except for all the others. |
| Mac is just as bad. It's a hard problem. I worked on it briefly, and to help solve it I kept track of the average time it had taken for a whole range of operations, like creating, moving, deleting, renaming a file, or moving a block of N bytes, etc. Then multiply by the number of those operations that remain. But even that can be wildly off in degenerate cases. |
| Do you ever get laid? | Not since your Mom kicked me out. |
| Why has windows task manager never had a true force quit? | End Process is a true force quit. |
| What was your team's opinion on linux at the time? And what's yours opinion too? | I like it a lot, I was an early adopter back in 1993-1994 and tried to contribute some code for parsing IIDs, though I don't know if it's still in there. I hope it is, becaue then I'd have code in Windows, Mac Office, and Linux. I'd be everywhere :-) |
| Now that we have WSL 2, though, I do most of my Linux work under Windows! |
| How much of the original DOS code is still in modern OSs? | None whatsoever. In fact, the only commonality at all would likely be the PGM header on disk still traces its original layout to MS-DOS. |
| But rest assured there's NO code from MS-DOS inside NT, for example. It was a complete clean-slate design. |
| Was it you responsible for the atrocious naming conventions in WIN32? | Your username is dhbt12 :-) |
| What current developments in the world of operating systems are you watching with eager anticipation? File systems and LLVM seem to be the rage right now, at least from where I sit. | Containers are cool to me, like Docker! That's really the biggest development of recent years I think! |
| the below has been split into two | |
| * What's your compensation? | - Zero, since I'm retired and there's no pension. |
| * Have you met Bill Gates? | - Yes, a number of times. When I was first hired he had me and a few other recent hires over to his house for burgers and beer and it was quite nice! |
| What's your opinion of free and open-source software? Broad, I know. I saw your response about WinRAR saying you like to license your software, but do you hold a similar sentiment in tossing a coin to the devs of foss software you might use? | I love it, I just don't have any illusions that making a piece of code open-source somehow leads to higher quality. It makes it more available to me, which is great, but in reality, on a typical project there are going to be 1-5 people who really look at the code and then a dozen the sort of know it to make changes, and then consumers of the code who just call it. I don't see that those 1-5 people are any brighter than the people who'd be responsible for a product in a proprietary environment. |
| Now at a certain scale, like the Linux kernel maybe, you've got enough eyeballs looking at it that it makes a difference... that I could see! |
| What's the idea behind SYSKEY? | As I understand it, its function is to encrypt something called the SAM (Security Account Manager) database. This database stores hashes of user passwords, and is used to authenticate users when they supply their password. |
| Hey Dave, what do you think the future of the windows OS will be? Is a cloud-based OS possible, potentially limiting computer hardware? | As a total guess, I imagine our experience will eventually be just a UI device locally and everything else happens in the cloud on server hardware. So as you say, at some point your client hardware is "good enough" and then companies compete on the merits of their back-end services. |
| Do you know Mike Toutonghi? , he used to work at Microsoft, now he started a new blockchain project called The Verus project. | By name and email but not well enough to recognize him at the mall today, I'd say! |
| If you had to redo windows, what would you most like to change? What do you regret most? What do you like most? | The Format dialog needs to be redone! And Task Manager is likely my favorite... |
| Android or iPhone? Beer or wine? Ginger or Mary Ann? | iPhone. Beer. Can't it be both? It's an island, after all. |
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| I figured the iPhone since you have Mac's in the lab. I figured beer also since you can't shift a 4 speed with a glass off wine between your legs. Nice garage BTW. However i wasnt ready for both, it's an island after all. Touche. I tired to compile my first bit of code from GitHub today. I failed miserably. It would install but wouldn't run. I'll keep at it. | Make sure you're in a clean empty folder. Try the code from Episode 11, I just used it so I know that works! Clone it and build it in PlatformIO with no changes, and that'll tell you if your dev environment is set up and working properly. |
| I cant connect to my cloud, can you download it for me? | I'd love to, but I'm out of paper. Can you fax me some? |
| What amazes you the most when you compare technology from the 90's to now? | GPUs! |
| Is it wrong of me to only ever end task manager with itself? | Software Seppuku. |
| Probably too many comments and very late to the game, but here it goes! I teach Comp Sci at an international school. Would you be willing to give a small webinar talk to my students? They would just be so happy to hear from you as would I! Anyway, regardless, thanks for the many, many hours of enjoyment! | Maybe after Covid, but I'm not a big fan of Zoom lectures! I just did one for the U of R, though, and if you check my channel there are two that I have done for the University of Regina that you might find useful for your students... |
| You can email me at [email protected] with info about the school and what topic you would like, etc, and I can see if it's a good fit for schedule and topic! |
| What computers do you personally at home? Windows? Linux? Mac? | All three! |
| Why are processes able to hang to the point that task manager is unable to kill them? | At that point there must be kernel corruption or something going on in a driver or well below the surface, I guess. If TM can't kill it, no one can, and it's truly hung. |
| Did you ever meet the genius who wrote the Space Cadet Pinball theme song? | No, who wrote it? Matt Ridgeway? |
| Hi Dave, loved the videos on task manager Do you have any thoughts on modern C / C++ replacements like Zig and Rust (respectively)? | I think its cool if memory access is indeed provably safe but you get code nearly as optimal as C, but I've got to learn more about them! |
| Did you like the windows phone? | Never had one, started after I left, but I heard nice things about the very last one before it went away... |
| Hi Dave, Why doesn’t File Explorer automatically refresh to show new files in a folder, such as downloads? Seems such an obvious glitch! Also, how do I get the login screen on Windows 10? I push space, esc, mouse clicks, enters... and nothing happens. Then poof, it shows up. Why is this so unresponsive? | It does. |
| In fact I know it does, because I have a patent on some of it! |
| Not sure why yours wound't be working, your system might have a third party piece of software that has broken File System Change notifications. |
| Was the time on Microsoft fun? | It really was. I miss the people and the environment, and I especially miss lunch! |
| i’ve found 15+ 0-days in the shell32 API when doing a vuln analysis of explorer.exe. You can read my work at https://hyp3ri0n-ng.github.io! What’s it like to write really buggy code :P? | I sense that high school was hard for you socially. |
| I’m sure I remember owning the pinball game as a separate standalone title before it was in windows? Can you explain the deal with that? Or am I misremembering | Plus Pack! |
| You're a legend, can't believe I missed this. I'll post this here, if you don't answer it I'll have a good copy/paste for later. What are your thoughts on the sethc.exe / accessibility exploit? It's worked as far back as XP, and still works today in Windows 10, last time I checked. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well. Is checking the integrity of OS files before they're executed just not a priority? | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/222193/description-of-the-windows-file-protection-feature |
| Why ctl+alt+delete? | An IBM engineer (David Bradley, I think) picked that combination to serve as a hardware reset. You can't fake it, you can't get around it. The PC knows it's really C_A_D when you do it. |
| Why that particular combination, you'd have to ask him! |
| What's the furthest you've gotten into a project that ended up not panning out? Was it something you really wanted to get working or were you relieved to move on? I'm a student studying engineering right now and reading these answers is extremely motivational; your passion for computers is awesome! Thanks for doing this. | I spent about a year on an early prototype of Media Center that I was attached to but got killed. They did do a Media Center later, of course, but I had started 2-3 years ahead, but couldn't get funding. |
| Why has the Windows she'll been so bad for so long? | I don't know, but I'll see you in he'll. |
| Do you still work at Microsoft? Do you still use only Microsoft stuff? | No retired in 2003. I use a lot of MS stuff, but my main laptop is a MacBook and I use a Mac for video. |
| Do you own any Apple products or use them for work? | I own all the Apple products except the new headphones, pretty much! I'm retired now though! |
| Is the workculture of Microsoft at the time very different than now? How much does Bill Gates' leadership impact the company? What changes had his departure bring? | It is indeed very different under Satya than Bill, and the changes are widespread. But I left before Satya started, so I'm not really qualified to speak on them! |
| What are your thoughts on the age old trick of "Opening Task Manager to stop programs from freezing or being slow", is there some merit to doing that or is it just a simple coincidence? | Total coincidence, honest! Task Manager, at that level, is just a windows app with a message pump. It's existence doesn't do anything that solitaire or paint would not also! |
| No, but there's a great meme with the Star Wars general about how apps work better with Task Manager open because "fear will keep them in line". |
| It's purely psychological, though. TM doesn't do anything by running the calc or paint wouldn't also provide! |
| Did you work on Windows ME? If so.. What the hell happened to that OS that made it so terrible? I had kernal errors every week. | Nope! My work on the shell would have been backported to it, but I didn't work directly on 98 or M3, other than they used our NT version of the shell code by then I think. |
| Did you make any contingency for when Task Manager stops responding? | Yes, lots! Check the video the "Secret Life of Task Manager" for more dirt, but there are MANY things it does to help prevent you ever being stuck with no task manager: |
| https://youtu.be/f8VBOiPV-_M |
| If not asked yet If this is correct, as posted in Regina awhile ago iirc I saw a post saying you’re from Regina, Canada Is that true? If so that’s awesome to hear that someone from my local area made one of my favourite no internet game and the basic fundamentals of the most used OS for computers | Yes indeed, that's me! |
| Why is the documentation for WPA so bad and scarce? I have to refer to Bruce Dawson's years old blog to decipher some of the columns names. Are there any plans to add a comprehensive manual for it? | Windows Product Activation? Columns? Sorry, are you using WPA for something else? |
| Can I intern for you? | If you know how to write a Material-themed admin-style Dashboard in React, can consume a REST api in doing so, and have some experience with iPhone apps an Unity, then maybe yes! |
| I was actually looking for an intern this past summer to write a phone and web app... |
| how did you assured code quality and readability? did you use static analyzers/ unit tests or what? | Check out the "Secret History of Task Manager" video for a description of "NTStress" and how we nightly tested, but there were professional testers, every line of code was code-reviewed, and so on. |
| My understanding is it's quite different now, though! |
| When you say you worked on Windows activation, was it for more than a day? | That's an odd question. Can I ask why you think it might have just been for a day? Clue me in to what you're hinting at and I'll fill you in on the rest! |
| Why do I need to press 3 buttons and 1 click to open task manager? | Because you choose to fail! |
| You can do it with two clicks or one simultaneous multikey press! |
| Do you think WPA was a success? | I think so! It helped stem casual piracy, wasn't "cracked" for at least 18 months after we released it, and didn't unduly inconvenience users too often, I hope. |
| We were really aiming for the 95% case. Trying to catch the 95% of piracy that is people sharing keys, reusing their own keys on too many machines, getting keys off the web, that sort of thing. I think it accomplished that. |
| How did you feel about windows 8? | Same way you do. |
| Who invented the blue screen of death? | John Vert. He said: |
| "Back in 1991 I wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (and a truly gnarly bit of code it was!). I used the white on blue colors for two reasons. |
| * The MIPS workstations we were using for the MIPS port had firmware that presented a boot option screen in white on blue, so it made sense that the bugcheck screen would match. |
| * I (and many others) were using SlickEdit as our text editor and at the time its default color scheme was also white on blue. |
| I believe Mark Lucovsky wrote the original code that dumped a bunch of text to the screen. This was a bugcode and a stack dump, resulting in a bunch of useless hex numbers which product support would occasionally dutifully transcribe from the customers and include in the bug report. |
| There was no "typesetting" as we used standard VGA text mode on PCs. |
| I don't know the history of the Win3.1/Win9x blue screens, I think the fact they were the same color is just coincidence." |
| But can you make sick stick figure death match animations in QBASIC? | No, but I do a mean Bill the Cat ascii art! |
| How could you? | Sometimes you just gotta say WTF. |
| https://youtu.be/a0p7rJsYisw |
| What are you working on these days? | Mostly on programming tutorials and nostalgic "Windows War Stories" on my youtube channel: |
| http://www.youtube.com/c/davesgarage |
| [removed] | That's me! Went to Miller high, worked at ISM and SaskTel during college, etc! |
| Here is my question. Im a cuban teenager (17) and my dream is work is be a developer. What kind of mini works i can do for learn programation before University? | Do as many little program tasks as you can, and make sure you complete them, and SAVE them for the future so you can look back! |
| Try writing a little program to convert back and forth between roman numbers and regular numbers. Or fund the next highest multiple of 32, or count the number of it bits set in a byte. Or the real difference in seconds between two dates, that sort of thing. Real problems that you have to solve will help a great deal as they act as sort of a "forcing function" to make you get to the very end. |
| Do you like macaroni & cheese? | Kraft Dinner all the way. And I eat with little packets of designer ketchup. |
| Wait...you didn't built paint? I'm out. | Nope, sorry. But I owned calc for a while, back when we were adding infinite precision math to it! |
| Hi, If Microsoft wanted to, they could make it impossible to activate a pirated copy of windows using 3rd party software. So why aren't they making it impossible? | Not sure what you meant by 3rd party software. Are you saying Windows can actually be activated even if pirated? That'd be news to me, but anything's possible. |
| What was the criteria for “tilt” on space cadet pinball? I played that game for hours as a kid. | Spacebar would add a little "action" to the table, if I recall, and you could strike a balance of adding so much so often... but too much (ie: smash space too much) and it'll tilt. |
| Did you ever have to interview anybody at Microsoft? If so, what types of questions would you ask back then? What was your interview like going into Microsoft? | Oh yeah, I've interviewed dozens or hundreds I'd bet. I'd like to ask "calibrating questons" like "Give me a funtion that takes a number and returns the next highest multiple of 32" or "count the number of bits that are set in it" to see how their basic coding skills were. |
| Then I usually liked to give a problem I was working on to see what it'd be like to actually work with the person. |
| I interviewed three times, once as an intern, once as full time, and then once to move to the Shell group. Each as an all-day affair, and very arduous. You have 2-3 hour long interviews in the AM, then a lunch interview, then 2-3 more hour long interviews in the PM, then a supper thing, etc... it's a long day! |
| ImRandyRU: What have you done for me lately? Edit: it was a joke... dabigchina: NT is the foundation that all modern windows OS's build on, so a lot. Zeusifer: I guarantee some of OP's code still exists in Windows 10. | Most of it, to be honest. As a guess I'd say 75% still there. |
| Hey man, I had a wicked dump this morning and now my toilet is blocked. Any idea's? | More roughage in your diet. |
| It was so satisfying to push the 3x5 disks into the slot and have the button pop out, and make a vroom vroom sound. Ah, the old days. What's your favorite MS-Dos game from the 90s? | I actually came to the PC after MS-DOS, so I wasn't a DOS gamer... I suppose in those days it was primarily C64 and Amiga games. I do remember being fond of Sim City, like everyone, but also of a game called "Seven Cities of Gold"... |
