Naturally, Plummer is keen to give the lion's share of the credit for the Start Menu to the Windows 95 design team, but shared the tricks used to make the product name - Windows NT, 2000 Professional or whatever - turn up sideways on the menu without requiring a library of localized bitmaps: "You couldn't at that time draw sideways text," Plummer explained, "and you certainly couldn't in Windows 95."
"But could you do it on Windows NT? Well, not directly, but Windows NT provided something called Coordinate Transformations that allowed you to do things like rotate the entire device context. If you did that by 90 degrees and gave it the right Coordinate Transformations then you could magically draw into it and it would render it directly up."
Plummer also spoke of the pain of moving from the NetBEUI networking stack of Windows 95 to the TCP/IP preferred by Windows NT. Plummer was tasked with rewriting that part of the Start Menu to run asynchronously, so that the system wo...
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