Veteran Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB so it could run smoothly on 90s computers — original utility used a smart technique to determine whether it was the only running instance
Posted by rkhunter_@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 26 comments
_dude_404@reddit
Those people at Microslop are trying to whitewash the mess that it has become
adzm@reddit
Oh come on. It was a shell extension with the most basic zip support.
Bananenkot@reddit
Ah I know this guy, he made a competition to find out what programming languages are the fastest by iterating a prime sieve. He didn't understand how comptime works, did allow it for zig and concluded zig is 10 times as fast as C. At first I thought it had to be april fools or something lmao
CramNBL@reddit
Lmao, No way
Bananenkot@reddit
Im dead serious
YaniMoore933@reddit
that's pretty cool! working at blizzard must’ve given you some great insights into project management. what features did you focus on for your task manager?
Other_Fly_4408@reddit
Clanker
BlueGoliath@reddit
Truly a "civil" comment.
BlueGoliath@reddit
Veteran Microsoft engineer says the obvious -- original utility used a common sense technique.
SaxAppeal@reddit
May seem obvious to you, but software development is much different today than it was then. Quite a lot of applications today have the luxury of not worrying about the performance issues that mattered in the past.
CramNBL@reddit
I agree that performance is neglected in modern software development, but modern software is also vastly more complex (because it does a lot more, and we expect a lot more)
SaxAppeal@reddit
Oh for sure, the benefit of modern compute is that we can build and do so much more than in the past, and we have the luxury of not needing to worry as much about performance outside of egregious violations (accidental quadratic or exponential algorithms)
CramNBL@reddit
I recently refactored something that was tanking performance and it had nothing to do with big O. It was O(N) and what killed it was over allocation and lock contention. Solution was just fewer allocations and no eliminating a lock.
Modern software is complicated a lot by multi-threading.
SaxAppeal@reddit
Good point yeah, multi-threading has its whole own set of problems. As does distributed computing
cake-day-on-feb-29@reddit
FTFY.
BlueGoliath@reddit
People probably do think everything was written in React back then lmao.
frou@reddit
I get recommended that guy's videos on YouTube and tweets on Twitter all the time - he seems a bit of a blowhard
jsheard@reddit
After he left Microsoft he founded a scamware company
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s-office-sues-settles-washington-based-softwareonlinecom
cake-day-on-feb-29@reddit
Hmmm, why am I not surprised?
danielcw189@reddit
he gives a lot of tidbits and takes that I find interesting. But his YouTube vidoes were too clickbaity, so I unsubscribed from him
KHRZ@reddit
And today, task manager freezes for 30 seconds when I open it.
bio_endio@reddit
I wrote task manager becoming the new I worked at blizzard for 7 years.
krypticus@reddit
What did you just say?
BlueGoliath@reddit
HE WROTE TASK MANAGER AND WORKED AT BLIZZARD DON'T YOU KNOW.
BlueGoliath@reddit
Always was.
Hot-Employ-3399@reddit
Fuck off licking this scammer ass