#479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Dave Plummer, programmer and an old school Microsoft software engineer who helped work on Windows 95, NT, and XP, building a lot of incredible tools, some of which have been continuously used by hundreds of millions of people, like the famed Windows task manager. Yes. The Windows task manager. And the zip unzip compression support in Windows. And he ported the code for Space Cadet Pinball, aka three d Pinball to Windows. Today, he's loved by many programmers and engineers for his amazing YouTube channel called Dave's Garage. You should definitely go check o
but the first computer I ever used was a TRS 80 model one level one four k machine. And I rode my bike in fifth or sixth grade, so was about eleven to the local Radio Shack. And you know, they had the standard component stereo systems, everything else Radio Shack had, but they had a stack of boxes that was labeled computer. And so I was asking the people that worked there about it, and they said, just got it, and they hadn't set it up yet. And so I was rather precocious, and I figured, well, I'll set it up for you. And they said, okay, have a shot.
Did you know what you were doing?
Absolutely not. I mean, it's no worse than a component stereo. The only thing is that Tandy and their infinite wisdom used the same five pin DIN connector for power, video, and I think cassettes, so they're all identical. And if you plug them in wrong, you'd blow it up. So I read the label. And got it working, wound up playing with it, and not knowing anything about computers. So I'm typing English commands into it, and you know, print two plus two works perfectly, yet more simple in English that you enter into a basic level one interpreter is not gonna get you very far.
So you're trying to talk to it in English.
Yeah. Didn't know any better. And I still have an old full scap that I wrote in sixth grade of a of a program that's kind of illogically correct, but has no chance of working on any interpreter that existed at the time. So it took me a while to figure out what was actually going on with them. But I rode my bike down there every Thursday and Saturday, and they graciously let me use the machines. When was this? 7980.
Okay. What was the state of the art of computing back then? So what are we talking about?
Well, the big three had come out. There was a TRS 80 model one. There was the PET 02/2001, and the Apple two came out roughly simultaneously. Apple two.
Would you say that's the greatest computer ever built?
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