Dave Plummer

He recalls first seeing a computer, a TRS-80, at Radio Shack around age 11 in 1979; he later learned assembly writing a Commodore 64 game and by 18 had briefly been a games programmer in Ottawa.⁠[1]

After completing a computer science degree at the University of Regina he joined Microsoft as an intern and then full-time, adding CD-ROM support to MS-DOS’s SmartDrv and writing the new Setup for MS-DOS 6.2.⁠[1]

He says he applied for a Microsoft internship after reading Hard Drive: Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.⁠[2]

In 1993 he was working at Microsoft on the OLE presentation cache of the Component Object Model (COM).⁠[3]

In his spare time he wrote a shell extension for the new Windows 95 interface that showed ZIP files as folders, which grew into the shareware product VisualZIP; Microsoft bought it, he used the proceeds to buy a red Corvette, and he says the code remains largely as he left it around 1995.⁠[3]

He says Task Manager’s birthday, stamped into its code, is November 10, 1995; he built the tool because he wanted to see what was running on his system, and Windows NT leader Dave Cutler tried it and approved shipping it.⁠[4]

He said Task Manager began as a shareware app he wrote in his den and planned to sell, which he donated to Microsoft; it first appeared in Windows NT 4.0, released in 1996.⁠[5]

As part of the team bringing the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT, he ported the Space Cadet table of Maxis’s Windows 95 Plus! pinball game as 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, which went on to appear in Windows NT 4, 2000, ME and XP.⁠[6]

He worked on the first incarnation of Windows Product Activation and, to distinguish OEM from retail Windows XP install CDs, concatenated and encrypted Microsoft Bob’s compressed floppy images into a verifiable block on each disc.⁠[7]

He recalls that Windows XP went to manufacturing partners on August 24, 2001, ahead of its October 25 retail launch that year.⁠[8]

After a little more than a decade at Microsoft, he left in 2003, after Windows Server 2003 and before the release of Windows Vista.⁠[5]

In July 2021 his YouTube channel Dave’s Garage, then with about 134,000 subscribers, launched a Software Drag Racing contest comparing dozens of programming languages with the Sieve of Eratosthenes; after he posted his original C, C++ and Python versions on GitHub, viewers contributed many implementations in other languages.⁠[2]

He appeared on episode 479 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose page describes him as a programmer, former Microsoft software engineer and host of Dave’s Garage; topics included his first computer, joining Microsoft, MS-DOS, Windows 95, Task Manager, 3D Pinball, the Start menu and taskbar, the Blue Screen of Death and the future of programming.⁠[9]

He said the worst bug he ever shipped was in Pinball: his game engine had no frame limiter, so on faster hardware the game drew about 5,000 frames per second and consumed a full CPU core, until Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen fixed it by adding a limiter.⁠[10]

In November 2025 he publicly proposed that Windows add a hardcore mode for power users, centralize its settings, adopt radical transparency and user control over telemetry, and end surprise reboots in favor of automatic health checks and rollback after updates.⁠[11]

In July 2026 he showed a Task Manager he was building for Apple Mac computers, written in Swift with no original code and planned as a free beta on the Mac App Store; he said Microsoft had sent him the Windows XP Task Manager source code with permission to share and demo it.⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/davepl1968 (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

Microsoft: Official website: https://www.microsoft.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]