The reality is Dave Plummer was called out again after incorrectly claiming Start Menu drew text sideways, that he built the entire menu, etc and was forced to backpedal when presented with evidence to the contrary. (He even revised the YouTube video title from I Built Start[...] to I Worked On Start [..., 1].) Once a scammer, always a scammer, it seems.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4Q6CF0E_8

This claim was so easy to verify with a Windows NT 4 ISO and a resource editor, but nobody did. And nobody thought the bitmap has much better font rendering than NT 4.

Dave retired from Microsoft and started a business that sold scareware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8

I’ve seen a couple videos of Dave Plummer and they were fun. Gave some insight to internals of Windows etc. I even followed him on YT back then.

But lately it feels like I see him all the time and there is something off with the guy. Can’t name what it is. Feels like he’s trying to milk whatever fame he got around the nerd circles as much as possible.

Orthogonal : I have to say I really dislike the cookie permissions dialog El Reg now use.

The first page is shows you with the "reject all" is only for the page of options you're on to start with - the "legitimate uses" page has a ton of stuff opted-in by default, and to turn those off, you have to click on every company, one by one.

Also, once you've hit "reject all", I can find no way to get that permissions dialog back again.

It's a deliberate UI approach to trick you into accepting a ton of cookies without knowing you've done so.

WinNT task manager is not the same as Win9x. I doubt it was "ported".

In Win9x calling the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) instantly stopped all tasks except the Task Manager itself, and the Task Manager was always in memory. Most mis-behaving apps could be closed that way. Only a system that was frozen on I/O would not respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL with the Task Manager, and open a blue screen instead (the "system is busy: press any key to wait or CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot" BSOD).

In WinNT, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do sh|t. All apps kept running. The Task Manager was loaded from disk (when the system found the time) and run in parallel with the other apps. On a busy system, especially if it was out of memory and doing disk thrashing, or some video/media was stuck with 100% CPU on high priority, there was no chance of recovering it with the Task Manager.

While he gave a nod to the Windows 95 design team for the iconic interface element, he explained how he'd worked out a way of avoiding a library of localized bitmaps by figuring out how to display sideways text.

In an email to The Register, Plummer told us: "Long story short, in the production builds, I've learned they went with bitmaps rather than the programmatic version.

"My guess is that's the way the art team had always delivered them ... and so it was just easier, but I don't have any real idea. I stay away from source code leaks so don't want to investigate the technicals!"

> "[..] I wrote the programmatic version in '94 and we ran it internally, but it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written, and didn't use it [..]"

I wonder if there are any leaked Win95 betas that can show the different approaches. I can imagine that a static bitmap would've been much faster and less memory intensive, something quite important when you're targeting computers with 8MB of RAM.

Software rotation of test is cool but cpu heavy (at the time)

Given the lag the current wx11 start menu animations illicit in slower machines, I'm not surprised they used to value speed over complexity.

Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the most usable of that era (just a bit later). It was stable, solid, and had a responsive UI.

Some choices in software shouldn't just be delivered in hopes everyone agrees with them, and even if they do, that they'll adopt as you envisaged - design decisions like this need to be shared so people have a chance of understanding and scrutinising the patterns involved.

Otherwise depending on your processes you'll either get what davepl got, or you'll be playing whack-a-mole in code reviews trying to protect your design; neither of those situations is a good use of your time.