muse

[muse @MuseNetwrk]

@100kshii Good one $tongue

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

This is me at Microsoft in 1994, posing with the dollar bill I won in a bet over the Windows 95 shell.

I was working with a guy named Bob Day and a few other devs to port the Windows 95 user interface over to Windows NT. Even though a year of work would remain for Unicode conversion and feature work, our first task was to get the code compiling for NT. That meant adapting every system call that differs between 95 and NT, handling cases that just won’t work on NT, and so on. For example, on Windows 95, you can re-initialize a critical section, but on NT, you cannot. And 95 shared a memory section amongst all shell processes, and so on.

After a few weeks of work I finally got it to compile, and out popped explore.exe and shell32.dll. I was so excited that I ran to grab Bob from his office to show him like a little kid.

Bob and I sat in front of my old CRT and did the obvious thing: we ran it to see what happened. But first, we took bets on how far we thought the code might make it. Bob thought it would die in DllAttach, or somewhere similarly early in the shell’s startup code. I was more optimistic. In fact, I bet it’d get all the way to the desktop.

I typed “explorer” and hit Enter. My hard drive churned a while - this was a big debug build after all, and my 486DX2-50 dev machine only had 12M of memory, even though I thought that was a lot at the time! Log messages scrolled up the screen of the amber VT220 that I had attached as a serial debugger, and a few seconds later, the PC’s screen turned that classic sea foam green!

A few seconds after that, icons appeared. They were mostly wrong, and the labels were missing, but it was the desktop! We sat in wonder that it had made it that far for a little while, and then I got greedy, and I think I clicked on the start menu or did something like that, and it crashed. But it had made it to the desktop, and Bob paid me my dollar.

“Well done", he said.

I went to put it in my pocket, but he immediately said “Don’t put it in your pocket, it’s your lucky dollar!”

I asked him, “Well, where do you want me to put it?”.

“Anywhere, but not in your pocket. Or it will get mixed in with the others and become just a dollar. Which it is."

He raised his eyebrows, turned, and left.

And so I pinned it to my cork board, where it stayed the rest of my career at Microsoft!

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