Microsoft's Task Manager turns 30: Original coder celebrates

""Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, says his lean original has grown roughly 50 times in size. Rather than critique today's version, Plummer took to his Dave's Garage YouTube channel to offer a window into Task Manager's scrappy origins, including the thought process behind its development, and his unfortunate decision to include his home phone number in the source code.""

""The birthday is stamped into the code itself: November 10, 1995," Plummer said. Task Manager emerged from what Plummer called "a very Unixy impulse" - he wanted to see what was running on his system. Windows NT had the architecture to surface that information but no dashboard. So he built one. "What happened next could really only have happened in that 1990s Microsoft era when the company still ran on caffeine and bravado." Plummer brought it in. The NT team liked it. Dave Cutler himself, then the leader of NT development at Microsoft, tried it, liked it, and gave the team the green light to ship it.""

""Not everyone was thrilled. Cutler had Plummer put Task Manager at the top of the Start Menu, horrifying the Windows 95 team, whose vision of a clean and simple interface had been despoiled by abject nerdery. "Some wanted it pulled," said Plummer. However, Task Manager also had its champions, and the code eventually found its way into the source tree.""

Dave Plummer created Task Manager on November 10, 1995 to inspect running processes, driven by a very Unixy impulse. Windows NT provided the necessary architecture but lacked a dashboard, so Task Manager surfaced running-process information. The NT team and leader Dave Cutler approved and allowed shipping. Placement at the top of the Start Menu upset the Windows 95 team, but champions helped the code reach the source tree. Plummer treated it cautiously as his first complete application, producing a compact, reliable tool; the NT4 Task Manager measured about 85 kilobytes. He later included his home phone number in the source code and the tool has since expanded roughly fiftyfold.

Read at Theregister