This is the same Dave Plummer that also created the Task Manager. He also has a YouTube channel with a lot of nice tidbits like this about what it was like to work at MS back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage
As I recall, he was also part of the team that wrote the Windows NT Start Menu by reimplementing the Windows 95 Start Menu which was written by an entirely different team.
And this is how, kids, generations of managers can’t find back their word and excel files they received zipped and edited in the doomed AppData Temp folder.
I guess it was a fundamental mistake on Plummer's part to not make said temp directory read-only, to force people to copy files out of the folder before editing it?
I think, if you press "Open" in IE on the file download dialog, it goes to temp. Then, the default for zips is to extract to the same folder.
So, the original mistake was offering people to open downloads without saving them first. I'm pretty sure they removed that later, around the time "mark of the web" was added (a metadata on downloaded files that triggered extra/different confirmation dialogs on opening the file).
That 'mistake' has become so widely used and depended on, corporate IT departments complained so loudly that Microsoft was forced to add that feature into Edge after IE was retired. I'm not sure if it was backported to Chrome or remains an Edge-unique feature.
Dave almost certainly has "fuck you money" from the stock he got in his employment at Microsoft. Not everyone's employers are going to explode in value like Microsoft either
A friend’s dad worked at IBM in the 80s and 90s. They told the story of his “million dollar car”, a Nissan Z that he sold Microsoft stock to buy in the early 90s.
Not quite as impressive as this $6M Corvette, but still a fun story.
A couple of years ago, a young family friend told me he'd had Bitcoin back when it was going for like nothing — he sold it to buy an iPhone or something like that. He was phlegmatic about the riches he'd have had if he'd hung onto the BC.
$6 million isn’t remotely fuck you money where “fuck you money” is defined (as originally) as the ability to say “fuck you” to anyone anywhere at any time.
Try mouthing off to a city inspector or a customs cop because you have $6M. They’ll fuck you right back like any other five or six figure pleb. Fuck you money starts somewhere in the hundreds of millions or perhaps low single digit billions.
Fuck you money, colloquially, is the ability to say “take this job and shove it” - not the ability to raise a personal army and conquer a small city state.
Yeah, nobody wants dollars anymore, they’re doomed. If you still have any laying around, you should wire them to me and I’ll dispose of that junk for free.
Come back here in a few years, you'll find my prediction accurate.
The position of the US is largely due to its ability to print money in the modern era and that era is ending. When company performance is largely determined by central bank interest rates you don't have a real economy.
Mercifully, Apple gave certified developers half off for those printers. I remember getting a bank loan for the $3500 printer. It cost more than my car. :0
I thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that they can send to customers vs 3rd partying it.
But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.
If I finished writing a school paper too late into the night, I had to wait until morning to print it on my dot-matrix because it would wake the entire house up.
I think they made special boxes you could put the printer in to attenuate the noise it made though generally closing the door of the room it was in was sufficient (this was whatever printer we had with an apple 2gs... probably some sort of imagewriter)
and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser
mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...
The LaserWriter was released in 1985, and was one of the first laser printers on the market (after the HP LaserJet a year earlier). It was a pretty big deal at the time.
I worked on a Adobe Acrobat-like document system (way before Acrobat :) that mastered CDRs back in the late 80s/very early 90s. The blank disks were $50 a pop and if you blinked and the data transmission hiccuped, it was a coaster. :0
Interesting to figure out where its cost comes from – the LaserWriter had a 68000 (no FPU) and 1.5MB of RAM – the Macintosh 512k released late '84 cost $2795, and it's surprisingly hard to find a workstation with increased memory but without secret sauce chips (e.g. the SUN bespoke MMU, whatever SGI had going on.)
> Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP.
I'll probably never use it over WinZip 6.2 or whatever but that's a nice story and it will be cool to see how it compares to the version that eventually shipped with the 98 Plus! pack.
So, the lesson here is to take something which you know to be a sub-optimal product, simultaneously sell and abandon it, and spend all the proceeds on luxury goods?
Naah, dude really didn't have a choice here. His two options were to be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature... or he could sell them his app, which they would then functionally abandon, and he'd get enough money to buy a sweet 'Vette. There's an absurdity to that situation that says more about the Microsoft of the '90s than about anything this dude did.
> be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature
It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.
They could buy out 7zip, shove it into Windows install, and make the existing UI point to 7zip API calls instead of explorer.exe ones. A drop-in shim, that would improve quality of life for millions.
It's a small thing, but many small things can add up to one platform feeling nicer. Like personally I can't stand the Apple ecosystem, but I know many that prefer it these days.
It's LGPL. If they kept to the existing interfaces they wouldn't need to, but honestly they aren't great. For someone like MS it's probably easier to buy either 7zip or WinRar out than to assure license conformity for the coming decades.
As the maintainer for Windows in-box bsdtar/libarchive, I'd love to learn more!
How are the tarballs you get out of it invalid? Do you have a sample file I could take a look at?
FWIW, since it is bsdtar it supports a few additional options[1] to control the format. You can pass --format=gnutar, --format=zip, --format=ustar, --format=7zip, ... for a bit more flexibility and to create archives in other formats.
I'm sure it was user error but `tar -czf` failed to produce a tarball I could untar on a server. Maybe due to it calling the wrong zip.exe? Maybe unzip on the server was using a different zlib or something? I'm not quite sure what it was but I decided to switch to using tar.xz for nix and zip for windows.
I'll see if my old devops code history can produce a bad-state tarball and get back to you.
When I've sold something - am I expected to continue to maintain it out of the goodness of my own heart? It's not owned by me anymore. If the purchaser wants to maintain it and/or pay me to then that's up to them. It's Microsoft which abandoned it, not the individual.
Probably I can't even create a more-optimal product. Any contract worth the paper it is written on would have a clause which says 'you can't go out and recreate an identical product immediately'.
And yes, it's a luxury purchase, but it was an unexpected windfall. They had a job with Microsoft so were presumably making a decent wage that covered their regular expenses already. Why not buy something to make you happy?
Perfect is the enemy of good, especially in business. This is nothing new.
The fundamental point of capitalism is that you work, get paid, and then can spend your money on whatever you want even if its silly. If the author likes cars, so be it.
I'm happy for him, but I dislike that extension. It's one of the first things I disable in a new Windows installation. I prefer to deal with compressed files explicitly.
It's in that awkward state where it kind of works and is really convenient, but you hit its limitations and general slowness all the time. It's good enough that it hasn't been replaced (say by an extension that employs a filter driver to make ZIPs truly behave like folders to all applications), but bad enough that it's annoying and most power users end up with 7Zip or WinRar instead.
I so agree. I've helped so many people that don't understand what a zipped archive is because they just open like any other folder, but only in windows explorer. I turn that nonsense off and explain to them the ins and outs.
He clarifies that he had prior written agreement to work on shareware and this software specifically. You can do this at most established big tech still today (possibly tougher at startups).
And hey it worked out great for Microsoft— they got the software they wanted at a great price (1x used corvette * ~1.8 for taxes) with no negotiation, and they already employ the guy who wrote it so I imagine integrating it was even easier than they expected.
Maybe MS just wanted to be nice.Maybe author was in a juridsiction where it is unclear how enforcible those clauses are if it was outside work hours and not using company equipment. Maybe they thought the price was low enough that it wasn't worth the potential backlash of appearing to be underhanded.
Just because something is in the contract doesn't mean it gets enforced to the letter if neither side wants it to be.
Giving one of your employees an unexpected bonus sure beats fighting them in court. It's a really small sum we are talking about here, they probably planned to spend more on it if the author was someone willing to negotiate. And it's not like the guy didn't make them enough money with his contributions
Even if your employment agreement doesn't say that, it might be advisable to sign an agreement with your employer that explicitly excludes any of your side projects that overlap with your employer's business. If it's linked enough to your employer's business, and you're salaried, and it could be demonstrated that it is part of your job duties, it might not be that clear as to who actually owns the code.
Yes. Canada and USA. If you read your employment contract with Th a large corporation there'll wording on intellectual property rights while employed. Chances are also good you'll have to review a document or training on yearly basis - not specific to this one thing but on various policies (security, ip rights, corruption, harassment, competition, social presence, etc).
Many people don't know it's there, for various reasons. But it typically is - after all, that's just corporations learning from history.
They're standard across almost all tech companies. Typically they're constrained to say that "anything you work on that's related to your job belongs to us"
Every employer I've had during the last 15 years or so have boilerplate language in their employment agreements asserting ownership of all IP I create while at work and at home, using company equipment or my own equipment, commercial or free, as long as it is remotely related to the company's past, present, or future business. And when your company is huge, they can and will argue that anything might be potential future business.
And yes, I've tried to push back on those, and so far no employer has been willing to negotiate.
That extremely depends on details of your contract, understanding with clients, level of honesty, risk appetite, and legal advice.
There are any amount of large companies where being employed by multiple entities is either frowned upon to expressly verboten. Of course, there are also any number of companies that do no care as long as you deliver, and many that actively encourage / expect nerds to nerd out in our spare time :)
This entire "You're a contractor, but you can only work for us" really makes me ask "Then why are they a contractor", cause it really sounds like they are an employee.
In this situation, they probably work for a consulting firm who is hiring them as FTE. And my experience with this is that the consulting firm itself is party to the agreement on how intellectual property rights are transferred and the employee of the firm signs an agreement that the firm can negotiate such on their behalf.
It boils down to, employee transfers IP to their consulting firm, and the firm agrees to transfer ownership of the IP for which hours were billed to produce.
IME, the firm I worked for would not bill clients for work done to our shared libraries. I'd record those hours to the firm itself, but I would still get paid the same.
Some places yes. It's a little different, at least it has been in all my contracts. The company you work for has the rights to buy the software from you, at a reasonable price. If they don't want it, you free to do whatever. They can't just take it.
I had colleagues would worked on a project in their space time, their price was reasonable wanting only compensation for the hours spend working on. The company didn't want it, but they also could not sell it, because if was so heavily tied into our systems and work flows that they couldn't reasonably sell it anywhere else.
One of those developers then started working on another project, one that was so fare away from what we did that there was no way the company would want it and turned that project into a very successful business.
In reality what happens is that people will work on something, quit, and the spend a few months on polishing and then release their project or sell it. Very few companies will want to spend time going after a former employee building some side business far removed from their core business.
>first, being 25+ year old code, it's single threaded. It doesn't matter how many CPU cores you have, it only uses one.
Ah, yes, the reverse of the "Javascript changes too quickly and has too many libraries" problem; companies refusing to rewrite old code because "it still works".
I feel like we should all be striving for the perfectly balanced as all things should be moments in development, code should never be left to languish for years without updates, but nor should it be updated when the wind changes.
This guy has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like he's grifting. Which isn't helped by the fact I've learned recently that apparently he literally did run a scam company and spread malware and got shut down by a state government, as other commenters have noted here.
According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...
"Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking."
Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft.
Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!"
It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there.
According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own:
History: Sep-26-96 Davepl Created (from old VZip code)
This was a set of utility CIDL functions and not related to the zip functionality in Windows.
That is interesting. There is also his story about 64bit Space Cadet Pinball which got disproven by NCommander. No one said he was lying, but maybe misremembering things, because evidently there is a working 64bit Space Cadet Pinball version. But he blocked every attempt to engage.
I also own one. It's the best file archiver for, well, archival, and the license really isn't that expensive.
Also there was that one time last fall where they gave a meme website a discount code that brought the price down to €9.99 and sold 5000 licenses in a day.
> Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP.
Of course, if you did that today Microsoft would probably sue you for competing with them.
> Keep in mind I'd asked for permission and got it in writing BEFORE I started. But yes, it was generous of MSFT to allow me that flexibility right from the first date of hire...
> That *could* be fixed, but I imagine the sense is that anyone who's hardcore about their zip performance or feature set will likely be using 7-Zip or WinRAR, etc.
On the contrary, power users like me use 7zip because built-in ZIP support is so slow. And the vast majority of regular users - they just silently suffer and use the slow-built in.
(And I use 7zip because it's the least bullshit compressor/extractor I know - works perfectly fine through context menus, without having to ever look at the main UI. But you know what would be even less bullshit? The compress/extract functionality in explorer.exe! If only it wasn't dog slow...)
No, they’re saying that they would use the built-in ZIP support if it was performant enough. Since it isn’t performant due to design limitations, they have to use 7zip.
I'm saying that approximately everyone cares about performance of this, or other functions of the OS. I'm using 7zip, even though I would prefer not to, but this is me solving the problem for myself. Most users are not capable or not in a position for this kind of self-help, so they're just silently suffering through.
I'm disappointed: I can't see any comments about the awful .zip file integration in modern Windows version.
Extracting the files requires a pop-up or a non-intuitive context menu.
Last time I tried to use the built-in zip extraction was in XP, perhaps Win7. It was awful.
It was slow. Unzipping archived source with thousands of files could take an hour or more... or 15 seconds via pkunzip.
It didn't warn of corruption. Windows-unzip a corrupted file, and it will just stop at the point of corruption with no feedback, as though complete. Using pkunzip you'd get a warning about a corrupted file.
Being that slow, and not reporting errors are two things that really aren't acceptable. I have no idea if it's improved since then.
It sounds like it was the best it could reasonably be expected be back in the late 90s, and if it hasn't been improved sufficiently since then is probably not at all his fault.
