Whenever I think of old-school programming, I think of people like Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager. Working for Microsoft in the 1990s, he built that app, which we now very much take for granted, brick by metaphorical brick. That isn't to say there was zero hackiness involved—far from it, as with much pre-2000s code.
Case in point is something I just learned about the original app: Plummer accidentally left his phone number inside it. "It's one of those tiny bits of old code that tells a story," he says.
It all started by him noticing, when developing the original app, that CPU utilisation was sometimes adding up to over 100%, which is "just not possible if the math is being done right."
After ...
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