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

“Process. One of the cooler things that I saw is, I don't want to say I invented Hamming Code, but I kind of invented Hamming Code without knowing Hammond Code existed. So every column and every row and task manager has a bit on whether it's become dirty or not. And then I can look basically the same way Hamming code looks on your X and Y columns to find out which rows have changed, go through and find out which ones actually need to be repainted. So Task Manager is super efficient and it works in concert with the list view control, which provides that functionality to go through and repaint as little as an individual cell that changes from frame to frame. So we could paint very fast. It can resize very smoothly. And resizing was probably my biggest.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple things that are a little hardcore now. I'm surprised I did. I didn't want to link to the C runtimes at all, so I made sure never to call a runtime call, and I didn't link to them, and that saved me whatever the C runtime is 96K or something. So, you know, it almost doubled the size of the app if you just touched any C call. So I was careful not to do that, but then I was actually writing in C++, which is C with objects more than anything. In order to get it to work, I had to go through and call all the object instructors manually from the dispatch table and stuff because you don't have the runtime to do it for you. So you're working with a compiler that doesn't have its runtime and I don't want to rat hole on the technical issues, but it's a lot of extra work to get it to work. But when you do, it's incredibly small and tight.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't assume much, right? If you're going to call the shell to run an app, well, that could be a network path that's on a TCP IP share that takes 90 seconds to time out. So anytime you do any kind of API call like that that could take time, you're going to wind up doing it on a separate thread. And so the app becomes a little bit more complex because everything is multi-threaded.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answers very quickly, which enabled it to become a very fast responsive app. So people have come to rely on it because I wrote it to be as reliable as possible. I wasn't worried about the features. It was a basic set of functionality that I wanted in there. And I got everything I wanted, but I wanted it to be really robust. And so small. And the original was like 87K.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had the great fortune of working on a lot of things that people are familiar with. And Task Manager is one of those side projects that I started as something that I wanted for myself and eventually came in house. So I started writing it at home and I got kind of the basics up and running. And I was using, I think it's HQ performance in the registry to get the stats because I didn't have access to the internal APIs because I was working from home and I don't call those if I'm working from home. And when I brought it in house, then I was able to call things like antiquery system information or antiquery process information and get the real.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what if Task Manager is a way to go in and find out which apps on your system are using the computer, using the hardware, using the CPU, using the memory, and which ones might be using too much or locked up or going crazy, and it gives you the ability to terminate and kill those ones? So it's an inspection and a fixing tool.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I tend to, it's not something that I want to. So for each function, if you've got assumptions, like I know that this point there is never null. Well, assert that. If you know that this count is always less than twice thete width, assert that. And don't be afraid, because if it asserts, it's doing you a favor. I think some people are afraid. It's like when you turn out of an intersection and you think maybe there's somebody coming and you don't look left. Or maybe I want to do that, but it's like that. People don't assert because they're afraid they're going to fire. Well, no, you want to know.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a little religious about my search too. I don't assert things that I hope aren't true. I assert things that I know cannot be true. And I think that's really the intent of an assertion, so I'm overstating the obvious. But when it does occur, it's a bug, plain and simple. It's not a warning.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how I find task manager code I search for my phone number on Google and it will reverse find the anti source code.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, if you see this message called APL at 425 836, my phone number. And finally, we did get a catch in the actual stress debugger that I was talking about earlier where it happened to somebody with a debugger connected. We were able to go through and it was actually a kernel accounting issue and it wasn't a task manager issue. Fixed it in the kernel once I was able to prove that it was, in fact, the kernel issue. And you think we would then remove my phone number, but we just commented it out. So it's shipped and it's in all the damn source code leaks for NT that are out there.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the ones that take you a day resolve one of two ways either it's like oh extra semicolon and then you finally see it It's some horrible manifestation of cross-threaded department nonsense that was really hard, but it can go both ways. I had a bug. It wasn't my bug actually, but it was a manifestation of a bug in task manager, where every now and then it would say greater than 100% total CPU usage. And this looks pretty silly for a task manager. So I had tried to resolve it for a long time, and I talked to the kernel guys about my issue, and they were unsympathetic, let's say, because the kernel guys are a special breed and they weren't interested in my userland problems. It's probably some issue in my code, right? And they're probably right, but it wasn't in this case, and I was sure of it. And so I kept adding asserts all through the code to make sure that the preparatory steps of adding the stuff together were never more than 100. and that the final sum was never more than a hundred. And finally, it never asserted. But occasionally we would get this bug where people would still see it. And so I finally put my phone number in the assert.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, I got a bit of reputation that somebody could fix stuff. And so stuff like that would flow to me. And so I would spend more time doing that. I wasn't renowned as a creative UI genius where I'm flowering all these new ideas. So I got to fix ugly stuff. But you get really good at that. So I don't mind it until it's one of those things where you've been chasing it for so long that you don't know what to do next and you can't understand why it doesn't work or how it ever worked or whatever situation you happen to be in. And, you know, after a day of it, it can get pretty trying.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a little cumbers Better, yeah, we're doing four instruction sets because we're doing Intel MIPS, Alpha, and Power PC. So depending on which machine it crashes on, you've got an entirely different instruction set and registers. So, you get reasonably adapted to bugging all four, but I had more experience in MIPS, so MIPS stuff would come my way.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About half your day is going to be spent debugging, and most of that time is going to be spent in call stacks that are in pure assembly language because there's no source level debugging. So it's not like we're in Visual Studio and you hit a breakpoint and it pops up, and there's the source code. You can go look at the source code, but you're looking at the raw assembly dump from the machine at all times.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became a shouting match and sort of a personal match, and I lost that one. And I still think that I know today that that code running on Windows is thousands of times slower than it has to be. And nobody cares because it's plenty fast. It could be a lot faster.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there was one that I lost that still bugs me to this day, I think. I still think I was right. Well, when we were doing the shell, we were porting everything from ANSI to Unicode. So every character that was 8 bits now becomes 16 bits. Now, the problem is I'm on a MIPS box because I'm porting it to risk. And you can't have unaligned addresses. But if you take two ID lists, which are basically path components, you take the one for C, take the one for Windows, take the one for system32, and you add them together. But if you've got an odd number of characters, now you're at an odd address in this thing, and it takes me an immense amount of work to turn on exception handlers, to do unaligned byte access to pull the string out and copy it manually. It's literally like a hundred to a thousand times the amount of work to read a string out of this idealist on a MIPS machine because it's unaligned. So I'm having the argument that even though it's late and the winter is 95, they've already shipped one beta, that we should now just guarantee that ID lists are always an even number of bytes, or do some hack to just make sure this never happens. So the code that references them on other hard work and just...”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it got contentious. So you've got intellects competing, and eventually the technical merits for some people are secondary, and it's about besting the other person in that argument. And it's no longer productive at that point half the time, but there was a fair bit of that.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody was complaining, a new hire came into the team and was working on what I believe was called Cairo. And Cairo was going to be the next future operating system was going to be beautiful and have a whole new user interface, newer than what it was 95. And it never materialized. But while they were working, NT dev alias, which is thousands of people, how shitty the anti-boot experience was. And the response that came back was an epic flame that I wish I would have saved, and I won't name the guy who wrote it. He knows who he is. It was a work of art of angry flame mail. Kind of like the ones you see Lion ascend every now and then about Colonel stuff. So it's a very similar sentiment.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools are everything, I think, for one. I mean, people are everything. We'll give that as a granted. But the tool set is a huge fact. If we would have had Git, it would have been immensely easier. We were using Diff and Manual Deltas. To do the sporting and stuff, so being able to fork a branch of source code would be a luxury that is new to me. Time it would have been really”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the dude's wicked smart, but he's also like a farmer. He's like the guy that will follow you around and make sure that stuff gets done and gets done right to make sure that you're not checking any crap into his operating system. And he won't tolerate it. He's a real taskmaster in that regard. But I think it really paid off because it was a very big paradigm shift for Microsoft developers to be subjected to the Dave Cutler digital equipment style of leadership.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not that there weren't other people that contributed, of course, huge pieces to it, but I think he's the driving force behind it and always largely has been. And he's still, I think he's 85 now. He still codes every day. He's a Microsoft fellow. As far as I know, still goes into work.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was basically a clean sheet design, so they went and they got Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment, who had done operating systems for them, VMS and RSX-11. He had done. And so he came over after, I believe it was Prism and Micah were some projects a deck west that got canceled. And so he had a whole team of guys whether project is canceled and basically they took a whole bunch of them and came to Microsoft. And I don't know the specific of the deal, but they all showed up. So you get Dave Cutler and Mark Lukowski and all these really smart guys from DEC. And they did basically a clean sheet, but they also had OS2 as a starting point. But OS2 was, of course, written in assembly language, and NT is going to be written in C. So to what extent they were able to leverage any of that? I don't actually know, but at least they had a system to start with.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breaking into somebody's house and going through all their stuff and seeing the stuff in their drawers that they didn't want you to see. Find all the good stuff, the pretty pictures hanging on the wall, and you find some disturbing stuff in the nightstand. I saw code that was like 200, some characters wide with, you know, profanity and swears in it. Let's eventually got all cleaned up over the years by the time I left, but it was not always the most professional code in the world.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we took the entire Windows 95 user interface and we ported it at NT, which meant making it Unicode for one thing. So everything that was 8 bits is now 16 bits, so pointers, it's quite a mess when you switch the code over, as you can imagine.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dave. And so you come in, and that's your first thing is to connect because you've got to get that machine back to the guy that owns it and unlock the machine. So that's your first hour of your day is basically triaged for bugs that have come up from stress overnight. And then at that point, it's probably back to coding, which unfortunately 80% of the time is fixing bugs, especially in my career. It was porting code and fixing bugs. I wasn't writing a lot of new code. There were exceptions. I wrote a lot of new code on the side to get it out of my system. A day to day grind of always fixing bugs in other people's code, which is amazing learning experience.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, your day starts coming in and you got to download the address book, which is Microsoft has between 10 and 15,000 employees at this point. And we're all on MS mail. We're just getting off of the PDP-11 called Miss Piggy, which ran WizMail. And we're running MS Mail. But MS Mail has a fixed address book that every user must download every morning. And when there's 10,000 people downloading 10,000 people, it gets pretty messy. And I think we're on 10 megabit networking at the time. So your first hour is downloading the address book, which was always frustrating. But you'd use that time to look at the crashes that would have happened overnight from a process we called stress, which is NNT. All the machines that are unused run tests all night long, and they try to crash themselves. And if they manage to crash themselves, it will drop into a debugger with a serial cable to another machine, and you can connect to that other machine and remotely debug the crashed machine. So you come in and they will have triage bugs. There was a crash in the start menu, so we'll assign that to them.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's penetration on the server side of things now. I don't know if it's equivalent to what System360 achieved, but it's almost ubiquitous.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you think a machine and write a cool ball program for it in 1962, jump in your time machine, go to Poughkeepsie and boot up an IBM Z17 mainframe and run it today? And they've been doing it for however many years that is. It's all on the business side, so we as consumers don't have much access to it. But I think it was probably as influential in the commercial side as Windows 95 was in the home side. And then probably Linux would be number three for me. I put Linux as bigger than Unix, which doesn't work because you can't have one without the other. But the impact of Unix, BSD, and so forth, is largely in the academic space. It's by programmers for programmers.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to make it as basic as the start menu, but I think it's a big part of it. I know when I first saw it. I couldn't quantify what about it was different and awesome, but I realized that I wanted to be a part of it, and that's why I started writing a shell extension, which became zip folders at some point. But I was just fascinated by the new shell, and that's why I ended up working on the team that brought it.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does 95 is an evolution of the original 16 bit Windows 3.1, which was the very first popular version of Windows. And it adds 32-bit support and in VXD drivers and a bunch of new technology and an entirely new user interface. And it's something that at the time was revolutionary. People lined up at night to wait in line to buy the thing.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually worked on Windows 95 for about three or four months. I was on the COM OLA team doing the presentation cache, which is when you insert, say, a word or an Excel spreadsheet or chart into a Word document, you don't want Excel to have to be loaded to render it every time, so there's a presentation cache of enhanced metaphiles. And I was working on that. So that shipped in Windows 95, but I moved to the Shell team about six months after getting to Microsoft. And so I worked on NT from there forward”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put your code in there, and then you just put stubs to jump to it from low memory, and so you can get another 64K out of the machine that way. And we did that for a couple of the products. And I had no idea what HyMem was because I was an Amiga programmer and I'd never written any x86 code before I got there.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the first things I did was to take smart drive, the disc cache, because I had familiarity with disc caches and to add CD-ROM caching to it because I was new. CD-ROMs were just coming out. Microsoft Bookshelf is one of the few products you could run for it. And as you can imagine, caching a CD speeds it up by dozens of times if you're smart about it. So it was a big performance win and a nice thing to work on. A bigger part of that was moving a bunch of smart drive and eventually the double space compression engine up into what's known as high memory. And without rat holing on the technical aspect of it, on the X86, there's something I believe called the A20 line. And I probably have this backwards, or I got a 50-50 shot at it. But if you've got the A20 line asserted, then your memory pointers wrap at the one megabyte mark. And if not, they don't. Continue going up in memory. So you can rewrite memory above by combining your segment and offset registers to a number bigger than one megabyte, and you get an extra 64K.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 640K is the maximum that's ever going to be available. So it's not what's available to you as an operating system developer because whatever you use is what the user won't get. So if you use 10K needlessly, you're going to, every machine in the world now has 10K less. So that's kind of a big responsibility.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was limited by the original x86 instruction set, which limited it to 640K. And then there were various band-aids on top of that to do high mem and then extended memory beyond that. A lot of hoops have to be jumped through to make anything work without consuming base RAM.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's largely a command launcher. So you type in a name of a command, it looks up to see if that's in the current directory or on a special path of folders and it loads it into memory and executes it if it's there. And that's 90% of what MSDOS does. Now it has environment variables and some complexity and a small scripting language built in, but it is basically just an operating system shell that allows you to use the resources of the computer like the hard drive or the CPU. And it doesn't allow you to multitask. There's no graphical interface. Now Microsoft did add a text-based graphical interface for things like an editor and QuickBasic in DOS 5, I believe. And it was a DOS shell, which was sort of a graphical file manager in MS-DOS 4. So they experimented with it, but it's largely a command prompt.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, before DOS, they were largely a language company, so they had made basic for a lot of computers, and they had a Fortran compiler and a Pascal compiler, that kind of thing. But their deal to have MS-DOS included with every version or every instance of the PC effectively set them as a standard that they were able to leverage for decades going forward. And to a certain extent they lucked into that. On the other hand, they were smart to have done it. Because they didn't charge IBM a lot of money for it, but making it a standard. Really Play Do their advantage over time.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he was a relentless in the pursuit of his one dream, which was his old slogan of a computer in every home and a computer in every desk. It was a special interest. He was the smart guy, super determined, and he hired people that were as smart or smarter than him to help him execute it, and he built an almost unstoppable machine of intellect to go forth and make Say, very simple products. MS-ZOS is not a complicated product by any stretch, but it's exactly what the market needed at that time”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, it was the single most potent assemblage of smart people that I've ever been a part of. And I've been an academia and I've been in industry to a certain extent. And You know, when you're working at a regular computer company, the one guy who actually knows what he's doing, his smarter friend, he probably works at Microsoft. So when you get there, you're the big cheese from your small town. You think you know a lot. And all of a sudden you're just in an environment where you're like, uh-oh, I'm just not going to speak because I don't want to look stupid.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. I think I started on Usenet and some of the Amiga forums posted. Here's my trial version, try it out for 30 days, see what you like. And eventually got picked up by a few retailers. And I remember I was with my now wife in her car. And she had a cell phone because her dad was very concerned about her safety. So this is late 80s and she's got the antenna on the roof and the big box in the trunk, the whole deal. But we got a call from one of the software retailers that wanted to buy 50 copies at 20 bucks, which to me is 1,000 bucks, which in 1989 or whatever year it is was a big deal. And so eventually a number of companies just bought an inventory.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Device block IO, so any block that gets service from the drive would go through my cache first, and it was an N way associated cache, and so it would try to match the geometry of the drive and do prefetch based on you're trying to read a whole track at one time, that kind of thing.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was some assemblers, the actual really tight code to do the real work of transferring data to and from the cache with 68,000 assembly. Everything else was C.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Email their email and they send it in, they get notifications of updates, and so on when it's shareware. And I went through the whole stack looking for anybody with a Microsoft email address. And I found maybe three or four people, and I just cold emailed them and said, hey, I'm an operating system student in Saskatchewan looking for an opportunity. I don't remember exactly what I said. One guy, Alistair Alistair Banks, he wrote back and he said, I know somebody that I can put you in contact with, and he put me in contact with, I think, with a guy named Ben Slivka who did a phone interview who eventually went up hiring me to work in MS DOS for the summer. So that's how I got there.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really amounts to swapping cars, but then figuring out why they're configged outsys doesn't allow Lotus to run anymore because it's got 10K less than it used to, and it's just a horrible time to be working in computers, but I was doing it. And at lunch, I'm sitting in the food court with the old and the board, and I'm reading a book that I had bought called Microsoft or Bill Gates in The Making of Microsoft Hard Drive, I think is his title. And it's a great book. It's just sort of a matter of fact history of how Microsoft came to be, what it's like, how it operates, what the people are like there. And I'm reading this book and I become really entranced by it and fascinated because it sounds like exactly the place that I want to be, but I'm in Saskatchewan, so what am I going to do about it? And what I wound up doing was I had put myself through school with a program called Hypercache, which is a file system cache for the Amiga because the Amiga didn't have any out of the box. And it had done reasonably well. And so I went through my registration cards because in those days you had a 4x6 card that people had to fill out with their name and their address. And if they had any.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a big jump. So I had gone back to school, and I think it was in my third year of university. I was working for the phone company for the summer as a summer job, and I'm doing conversions of their UBNet to TCPIP and modern networking.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, ideally, there's some aspect of school that you do enjoy, whether it's art, whether it's computer science, whether it's shop class, whatever. So go for those classes and just put up with and do the hard stuff because it's way easier than having to do it later. And that's easy to say when you're 50 something. It's harder to say when you're 15 something. Makes a lot of sense.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was a terrible student in high school. And even my first semester of college, I still wasn't taking it quite serious because I got mercy passed in geometry 90, which is like the makeup class for the geometry 12th grade class that I didn't have. And that scared me because I realized by 1% or the grace of the professor that let me through, I just would ended my entire university career here. So fortunately, those marks don't count within a transcript because they're remedial classes. And so I got kind of a fresh start the next semester and did it for real. I did it for me. And that made all the difference.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with that process is you're making a much smaller decision. I'm just not going to go to class today. And that's all you're deciding. But you do that enough times, you're making it much bigger decision. And that's the problem.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I have a revelation about my life that next time I'm going to do it differently. And then how ludicrous that is hits me about three seconds later, right? And I think that was really the moment for me where I realized that I've got to do something different. And so even though I was 21, I went and I talked to the principal of my local high school, and I was like, can you let me back in? And he said, no, you're too old. And we don't have room was his main reason And I said, well, between now and then, somebody's going to drop out. So you'll have room. So it's assuming you have room, kind of come back. And he was gracious and let me come back. And so I did the three or four classes that I needed.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the worst moment for me. I mean, I got held up at knife point and stuff, and that's all entertaining. But the worst, the most The suckiest part for me was doing the gas dips. We've got a long, it's like a 15 or 20 foot wooden stick, and it's measured in gradients of inches and feet, and you drop it into the gasoline tanks, and then you bring it up and you measure where the gasoline sits because there's no electronic sensor. So I'm doing that. And the first time I do it, I drop the pole and I re-drab it. Well, that's about a thousand splinters of wood into your hands and it's 40 below out, and that really sucked.”
2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source