Dave W Plummer

How I spent 1996: My boss wandered into my office and said "Hey Dave, do you want to rewrite pinball for Windows NT?". I said "Hell ya" and got paid to write and play pinball for two months... while listening to Soundgarden. And kudos to the original designers for a classic!

This is me in my Microsoft office in 1995, working on she Windows Shell and Task Manager. Who knows why there's a dollar pinned to the corkboard?

I wanted to learn turbocharging and engine management, but I didn't really want to build a car around it on my first attempt. So I built this intead. I took a GM ZZ502 short block, Trick Flow 340cc heads, and went shopping on eBay for cheap Chinese turbo parts. I found the two…

I'm so old I wrote that! That's assuming it's the Windows version, which is the one I worked on. The Win9x game, art, and original code, were done by Maxis/Cinematronics. I ported it to Windows NT, converted the x86 asm to C, made it work on RISC, and so on. Success has…

Success! And I wrote my first BSD UNIX kernel api today: sys_wait_for_panel_update() I wanted to add a virtual panel to a real PDP that did not have a real one. To that end, I added code to the power line clock interrupt to save the CPU state 60 times a second. It then…

Adding a new syscall to the UNIX kernel today, and I got stuck for hours trying to invoke it. Can you see the bug, and why it matters? WRONG: .globl  _wait_for_panel _wait_for_panel: sys 67 rts     pc              / return result in r0 RIGHT: .globl  _wait_for_panel…

pulled up to this insane EDM boat rave on friday—my literal spawn @itspoolaid was on deck melting faces w/ the filthiest drops vibes were maxed, crowd was feral, beats were full send. we were out on the water catching seattle sunset glow while the bass physically rearranged my…

I bet I had multiple monitors before you! Back in 1995 when I was working NT Datyona (3.51) we got the early support that ultimately shipped in NT 4. Of course it you had a Mac, they had it even earlier! If I recall, the earliest NT setups required a Matrox card? I wonder if…

Each of these boards costs $52,800. This is what the largest single memory board, at 128MB, looked like in 1993, back when I started. This is for a DEC VAX 4000. It could carry four of them if you had a a quarter million dollars to spare. My own dev machine (a 486DX266) had…

Today, I feel seen.

Perhaps for the lower 40% of the population by intellect, it's compellng content. And you only need 50% to win an election. Gotta know your audience.

If you've ever been curious how many results this thing could find, the answer is 10,000. It was a hard-coded limit at one time.

Here's a virtual panel that Rutger and I made work with my real PDP-11 hardware. I put code in the 211BSD UNIX kernel on the PDP-11 to store the CPU state every power line interrupt (60Hz). Then a client app reads that data 30 times a second and sends it to a UDP socket on the…

My CPU! It's a DEC KA694 from a VAX4000-705A. It runs at 112MHz and is about 95x as fast as the original VAX 11/780.

Paid performances such as sports should be compensated based on the ticket sales and media licensing. The NBA: Net revenue after non-player expenses / active players: $4,080,000,000 ÷ 450 ≈ $9.07 million profit per player The WNBA: Lost $50,000,000 / 156 players = $320,500…

An M1 has been my daily driver for four years. I see no compelling reason to upgrade.

I am, but ironically, I never wrote a Windows app before joining Microsoft... I was all Amiga and UNIX at the time. I had wanted to tinker, but the SDK cost $300 at the time, which was more than vehicle I was driving.

Yes. Yes I do.

Win98 Plus! was the first software I ever sold to Microsoft. I wrote the ZIP file extension as a side project, and a few months later, got a call from Microsoft business development that they wanted to talk about an acquisition... It turned out they didn't know I already…