YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Plummer

lines on the record: 165
first: 2025-08-29
most recent: 2025-08-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know if it's a very apt description, but I think of it as crisp. So there's not a lot of rough edges, it does what it does, does it snappy.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think so. It certainly got the longevity for it. There's people who would still run it. I mean, I'd still run it on stuff if you could get security updates because it does 98% of what I need a Windows to do.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I liked it. I mean, it doesn't have the visual flash that came with XP, but as a system, and especially as a server operating system, it was great for the day.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I ran my business on. I ran my brother's business. We set up multiple salons, all VPN to one another and using the SQL Server.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I always tried to cater to the greed aspect. Make your computer faster, get more RAM available, whatever the value proposition is. But I realize now that I'm looking at that with my knowledge. And as an autistic person, I now have an appreciation that other people are going to look at it with their background knowledge and may conclude something different. So I might be scaring people where I was just trying to incentivize or get their greed instinct going. So I'd be more sensible about that kind of thing today.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm way more self aware now. There's things I would do much differently, particularly in terms of the advertising. I always figured there's a guy named David Ogilvy, and he did this ad long ago for the Volkswagen Beetle where it did a picture of a beetle black and white, and it just said lemon. And there was a block of text below it. So it's clickbaity and then informational. And I always tried to follow that pattern. But there's three ways to sell something, I think, and you can use sex, fear, or greed, and sex doesn't work very well for software. Fear works well for antivirus and stuff, but not so much for optimization and make your computer faster utilities.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would much rather pay $1.99 for Windows Pro per year or $20 a month or whatever the fee schedule would be and not be upsold any further and not have my data monetized and those kinds of things.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want your operating system to be an adversary, right? Sometimes Windows can feel adversarial, like it doesn't have your best interests at heart. And that bugs me to a certain extent.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that really throws me is the use recommended settings. So I just did a Windows upgrade, I went through the steps, and I'm going through this new dialoger wizard and use recommended settings. Sounds like the thing you should do, but I'm pretty sure that resets you to using the Edge browser and all this other stuff. So yeah, recommended by them, but not recommended for me. And that's the difficulty.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer at most once a day. And the AG contended that I was too often. It amounted to spam. And so we agreed with them to limit it to once a week, I believe. And it had to be a button to just uninstall with one click. So we did those kinds of things. The other one was, in those days, when somebody bought a piece of software, even if they bought it online and got a download, they fully expected there would be media showing up at their house. So in the year 2001, which were 2001, 2003 that we're talking about, if you bought software, there was an expectation that a disk would show up. And so we made that to default was to fulfill by disk, and it was $395 or $4.95 extra. And it was very obvious, but it was a checkbox and it was turned on to ship the disk to your house. Because we found if we didn't do that, we got all these calls. People would wait order two weeks later call, where's my disk? And we'd look, we didn't order disk. Well, cancel it all. I don't want it because I'm not waiting for it. And so we got a lot of returns and we didn't include the disk and so we decided to include the disk. But that is a priority violation of negative affairs.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't set a cap on it. I came back on Monday and I saw I had spent like $10,000 in banner ads. I was like, holy crap, how am I going to explain this to my wife? This is a bug. It's a mistake. It was my fault. And I looked at the sales and it had made like $38,000 worth of sales. And I was like, holy cow. So all I have to do is scale that at some point and basically did that for the next several years. And the reason we got in trouble was the AG came in and they had, well, I was blowing away because they had like 12 claims of action and 10 of them were outrageous, which to me as a person with autism, I couldn't get past. It's like I know these 10 things are absolutely not true. Why are we even here talking about them? And all they carried is the two things that might be true. And the two things that might be true were that it was a 30-day trial version. And after your 30 days were up, it would then, if you continued to run it and not buy it or uninstall it, it would remind you once a day, not like every 10 minutes, but once a day or every time you booted your...”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was other than like family health scares, you know, when kids are sick, that was the scariest time of my life. And the period leading up to it was one of the most invigorating and exciting because what had happened was while I was at Microsoft, I had written all these shareware utilities and was selling them on the side and sold one to Microsoft as we talked about. And they started to do really well. And then I discovered banner advertising online. And so I signed up with my credit card for a site, I think it was called FastClick, and you could say I will pay this much for a banner ad impression. Here's my banner and it would rotate it in.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really a sea guy. Although I write two kinds of C I write really modern C 20 using no pointers, no character strings. So it's basically as safe as Rust, as far as I'm concerned. Or I write C with classes, which is standard C, but you know, with polymorphism and encapsulation. And that's most of what my code is. But I try to do both.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have a rotating knob, which is an optical spinner. And you have a fire button and a super zapper for emergencies, but that's it. Fire and rotate, basically.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long story short, it's a fairly complicated game to play well And I wanted to see if I could get an AI to do it. And so once I had figured out where all the interesting parts of the game lived in memory, I added them as parameters and built a Lua app to extract everything from the game's memory as it's running. And put them together as parameters, which sends it to the Python side over a socket, and then the Python side does RL learning. I'm using a dueling deep queue and, I believe, with a head and a tail. And they chase each other, and it can play up to about level 36 now, which is way better than most humans, but that's level 96, so it's got a ways to go yet.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a 3D geometric world. It's basically 3D space invaders wrapped into a shape, and the enemies descend from the center of the tube towards the outside, and they all have different behaviors.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a 3D vector game 1980. It's a very complex game. You got full free 60 degrees of motion. You have eight shots on the screen. There's like 11 enemies. Spikes. It's a very complex game. It's not like trying to do pong or something. And what I wound up doing was first taking the ROMs out of the machine and reverse engineering the code. So I got a sense of where all the code in Tempest lives and what it does, where the zero page variables are, where things live. Yeah”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm doing is I wanted to build an AI to play the game Tempest. That's the old Atari game Tempest. And this is a game that I actually hold the world record on. And”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I take it a lot more care and complexity these days. So it used to be you would write code and just keep writing code and writing code and then at some point I go back and clean it up. Well, I write the other way now. I try to write really clean initial skeletal code and then flush it out because I have been involved in too many projects of my own and of other people's makings where things get so messed up that they're just not fixable. And so sometimes the work you put in up front pays off, you know.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. What I love about it, though, and I'm sure you've had this experience where sometimes you design a piece of software and it's complex and you get it working in your head and you get the plumbing working and you know how it's going to run and flow and then eventually you write the code and the code does that thing that you had pictured in your head. And now there are billions of copies of that thing that I had in my head running on millions of people or billions of people's machines. And that in itself is really cool to me. It's not a vanity thing so much as I'm impressed by it, I guess.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About five minutes in, I just hear, oh, I see. And then they disconnected and got up and left. And that was Laura Butler, who became a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. I think she may still be. I'm not sure if she's retired or not. So she kind of set my template for what Microsoft developers were like when they were debugging and what kernel developers were like and even what female developers were like because I had such a small sample set. But it was a very high standard.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, I get stuck, so I'm kind of out of my element. And I send an email to the Windows 95 kernel team and say, could you send somebody by? And so about 10 minutes later, this developer strolls in and they're just holding a null modem cable, which is to connect my two machines together so they can debug one with the other in case I didn't have it, but it was already set up. And so they sit down and they're using WinDebug, which is just a horrible debugger. It's accursed. But they're very, very competent with it. And they are just blasting through the call stacks and they're checking all these objects in the kernel and trying to find out who's waiting on what and why things are deadlocked and what things are signaled and what's not. And it's just this quicksilver ballet of call stacks flying by and I'm watching this and I'm pretty blown away because I'm a good programmer, but this person is an amazing debugger and I've never seen a performance like this.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? I don't think there is anyone. I've met a number of great programmers, but I'll tell you one story that impressed me a lot was when I was brand new at the company. I've been there like six weeks and I'm working on this old A presentation cache that I mentioned earlier. And I'm on Windows 95 and I've got Excel inserted into Word and I'm in the kernel debugger and something's going wrong in the scheduler. And I've been there, you know, I've barely written any x86 code and I'm looking at the Windows scheduler trying to figure out why my thing is deadlock”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very impressive to walk through the code. It was one of those things where it was like, oh, I don't think I could have done that if I was trying.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terms of beautiful code, there's two that stand out for me. One is the kernel in general when you get down into the Windows kernel in the actual NT APIs and stuff. It's very well written. And it's written to a standard that you don't see on the user side, or at least is uncommon on the user side. On the user side, probably the coolest code I remember seeing was a guy named Bob Day wrote a named pipe implementation to eliminate the use of shared memory. So Windows 95 had a big shared segment amongst all the shell processes where it would store stuff that was common to all the shells. We didn't want to do that. Shared memory is a bad idea on NT in an industrial level. So he came up with a way to do it with NamePipe. And I remember doing the code review on it. Then it was.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two major things that happen with computers as you run them over time. One is memory gets used and not freed. And so it accumulates on the heap or in the swap file or wherever, and things get sluggish. And the other is code gets into a state that the developers didn't anticipate or didn't test very well. And maybe that's a rare state, but now that notepad or Word or Excel is in that state, your system is goofy. So if you just reboot the thing or shut it down or restart it, you're getting a fresh state and there's no memory leaks. So it covers a lot of sins, basically.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Windows 3 had a blue screen, but it's completely unrelated to the blue screen in Windows NT. And I talked to the guy that wrote the blue screen in Windows NT. His name's John Vert. And the reason he picked white on blue, I'd always... It wasn't that simple, it was just the MIPS firmware that he was building it on was blue on white. And visual slick edit that he was using as editor was also the same color scheme. And so you could code, boot, crash, and reboot all in the same color scheme.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it is is when Windows has no other option, when the kernel gets into a state where something illegal has happened. So let's say a device driver is trying to write to a piece of memory it doesn't own or is trying to free a memory piece of memory twice, something that just cannot happen and the kernel has no other option, it will shut the machine down to save your work. And well, not save it, prevent further damage And it flits up a blue screen and it prints out the stack information depending how your settings are. Sometimes it's just a sad face in the current windows.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked on the initial prototypes of Windows Media Center. So we did that in 96, I believe. And we didn't have at the time any sources. So we had like a CD of MPEG video files of Raging Rudolph. And I think the original South Park video, the Christmas one. Which is all wildly inappropriate in the workplace today, but that's all the content we had until we got actually had them put a satellite dish on the roof, a DSS, whatever the 18 inch dishes, because we couldn't get cable to the building. And so we built up this thing that would eventually look a lot like Media Center, and it was distance viewing UI for Windows so you could sit with a remote control on a desktop and the current start menu is not great at 20 feet away.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it could be vastly improved, but you know, it was written in a single core day. So it doesn't do anything multi threaded. And you've got a 96 core, 79, 95. Well, it uses one of them to unzip your file.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really born out of the BBS era when people were dialing in on modems to download trialware and shareware and other things from BBS online and to compress them, executables compressed about half their size. Other stuff compresses much more. But a guy named Phil Cass came up with a command line program for MS-DOS called PKZIP, which was able to do compression of programs. And he has a rather tragic arc, but it became ubiquitous in the entire PC industry and pretty much everybody was using it. So when Windows came out, there was no way to open up a zip file, but everybody had been creating them for a decade. And so that really drove the desire to have the zip support right into Windows.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. So we took a lot of features out, right? To simplify because it had encryption, it had a number of features that were common in zip programs of the day, but probably weren't appropriate for Windows. And at the time, encryption was like a munition. So you couldn't just add encryption willy-nilly to various parts of the operating system. So we took out some things like that multi-volume support, I think, was taken out just to simplify it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was a few minutes back and forth where we both realized that she didn't know I worked there. They're just cold cold, the author, and then found out that it was me. And... So they made me an offer on it, and it's the kind of thing where if I don't accept the offer, now my choices are I can keep selling my own version and quit Microsoft, or I can stop selling my own version and work for Microsoft. Neither of those is great. I mean, I keep my job, of course, but I'd like to have this income stream. And the other option was accept their offer, which is what I did. So then I bought a used 93 Red Corvette.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sample that I saw on how to bring up a folder. Well, once I had the very basic bring up a folder template, adding zip file support to it was just incremental all the way. And I released it as a shareware product. I think it was 1995 or 2995, and I sold whatever, a couple hundreds or thousands of copies. And one day I'm getting ready for work and I get a call, and it's a lady, and she says, are you Dave Plumber? And I said, yeah. And she said, are you the guy that wrote Miguel Zip? I said, yeah. And she says, well, this is Betsy from Microsoft, and we'd like you to come by and come in and talk about an acquisition of it. I said, okay, well, what building are you in? She's like, what do you mean? I said, well, I'll come by. I said, well, no, you've got to talk to travel and you got to talk to legal. And this all has to be set up. But I'm like, I don't get it. We both work at the same place. Why can't I just stop by? I don't know if I said that literally.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a piece of software that I wrote at home again. And what happened was I was out with my wife and I think it was a Sunday afternoon. We're driving around. This is 1993 and we're living in our apartment and we're just seeing what the housing market is like out there. And there's a guy. He's got this beautiful three-bedroom house and a Corvette convertible, 93 red torch red parked in the driveway and houses for sale. And it's like 300K, I think. And there's no chance I'm coming up with 300K at that point or even the down payment on that. I took the flyer and I cut the picture of the house out and I taped it to my monitor. And that was my incentive to just write something at night. Because when I came home, I was doing two things. I was one expressing a creativity that I couldn't get out of work when I was just fixing bugs. And I was trying to make some extra money. And so I wrote a shell extension before I actually went to the shell team, I started it, and that's what led to my interest in going to the shell team based on MSDN sample or MSJ at the time, MSJ.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but how do you respond to Steve Jobs aspect of? Giving you customization implies that we couldn't figure out the right answer for you. Or maybe there is no right answer, and all four answers are equally right. I have no idea”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You won't see much craftsmanship unless somebody owns a component for a long time, and it settles to a point that at the end you can work on and polish it, right? But if it's always churning and the UI is changing every release, it's never going to get that level of polish. Although I think the UI is pretty nice, but.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I bet it was. I bet it was a scheduling decision when they rewrote the start menu. I think they rewrote it because it's different than the old taskbar. And somebody was tasked with you've got to deliver this inside of functionality. And if I cut out putting it on the left and the top and the right and two rows of tabs and all the other cool features, I can deliver at four months sooner. And I'm not saying that's the right decision, but I'm guessing that might be the kind of thing that motivates it. And they're on such a different release schedule now. It used to be.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it does cost, right? Because the freedom to put the start menu on the left or the top or the right. Really increases the complexity of the code that renders the start menu and lays out the tabs and does all the things. And now it's a much larger surface for bugs and it's a much larger piece of code to maintain. So you probably need more developers or another developer or some portion of a developer's time. So the question becomes at what point is it still worth it to satisfy the niche needs of a small set of users? Those decisions weren't mine to make, but I could see it from both sides.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my more popular episodes of late has been Why You Can't Move the Windows Taskbar. I had no idea, but the outrage is palpable amongst people that you. On the left or top, and you can't anymore, and it is an affront to their existence, and I understand it to a certain extent.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, especially if you have to phone activate, and that was just the case that we had to carry with us as an albatross around our neck, where you've got to pass data up to the clearinghouse, the back end systems that are going to approve your key, you've got to tell all your hardware parameters, like how much memory and hard drive space and the various things the hardware key is bound to, as well as the product key. And you've got encoded in letters and numbers that somebody's willing to read in over a phone. And if you think doing product activation is painful over the phone, could you imagine being the person that worked on the other end of that line? I mean, that's just got to be a mind-numbing job to listen to product keys for eight hours a day.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they came to me late in the XP ship process. I don't know if the beta had gone out. I don't think the beta had gone out yet, but they had intended to take the office activation code and then adapt it to Windows and add activation to Windows. But whoever was responsible for doing it had slipped it enough times that it wasn't going to happen, and so I had kind of a reputation for being able to fix things quickly. So they came to me and said, can you get this done in time for XP? I don't know, but I'll try. So with the help of the guys that were doing the DRM stuff on the DRM side and the research guys doing the math for the product keys and everything else, we cranked it out in time for XP. And I don't know what the actual impact is for revenue, but I imagine it's substantial when you start enforcing license keys.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to volunteer teaching computer science at my kids' school for the third graders and stuff, so it's more like logging in than computer science. The kids, of course, all their dads work at Microsoft, so nobody's impressed by anything you do, but one of the kids found out that I worked on pinball, and then they were like, whoa, you worked on pinball because they all knew that in those days. Now the kids are probably aged out. They don't know it anymore. But for a brief period,”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The solitaire is there to show you how to do drag and And Minesweeper is probably right click. I think you put a flag or something. Yeah, not a minesweeper guy, but. Each one of them teaches you something”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a great design. I mean, I take no credit for that. That's all totally the guy that's a cinematronics. But the original game is a great design. It's very similar to Black Knight 2. And the layout is actually very similar. I don't know if it was inspired by it or not. So it's a good game.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's got an Easter egg built in. And decoding the state, it's like running a neural network through this thing as you hit it with different states. And I just put it aside and treated it as a black box. And so my code runs on top of that and does the drawing and the sound and everything else. But the original game is still running. And somebody recently asked me, why is it slightly different? The physics are slightly different from the Windows 95 version, but it should be the same code because I'm trying very hard to preserve that. But what it is, is I had a bug where I will draw as many frames per second as I can, which on a modern computer could be 5,000 frames a second for pinball because it's a pretty basic game. And so all your physics are interpolated 5,000 times per second instead of 30 times a second or whatever you would have got in the old one. So you're getting arguably better, at least different physics.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they came into my office and said, What are you doing? And I said, I told them what to do. And he said, How do you want to spend your next three months? I said, I have no idea. And he said, do you want to port pinball? And I'd seen space get a pinball as a game standalone for the 195 platform. And it had a couple different tables. And it was a cool game. So I was kind of excited. What they wanted was some visual splash for NT to show that NT can do for then high speed graphics, or at least responsive graphics. And so I took a shot. And unfortunately, a lot of the code was in assembly, and I was on the MIPS. So I had to rewrite the code in C so that I could then port it to all the different platforms. And the heart of the game is a huge state engine. It's like a giant switch statement with, if I remember like 50 entries in it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As far as I know, the original code is still mostly all there. So there are layers of drawing code and dark mode code and whatever else, XML, schema code that goes on top of that that makes it four megabytes instead of 87K, but that's the world we live in.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Functionality is very same. The reporting is more because they've added GPU and thermals and things like that, which is really nice to have. We didn't have that ability in the day.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personal goal with that app. So you can size it to any size, and it still works. And even if you have 32 CPUs, which wasn't possible in the day, it will draw, I think, only eight graphs and then it wraps, but it still works today. So kind of proud of that.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source