Dave Plummer

If you've got the A20 line asserted, then your memory pointers wrap at the one megabyte mark.

And if not, they don't.

So you continue going up in memory.

So you can rewrite memory above by combining your segment and offset registers to a number bigger than one megabyte, and you get an extra 64K.

And you put your code in there and then you just put stubs to jump to it from low memory.

And so you can get another 64K out of the machine that way.

And we did that for a couple of the products.

And I had no idea what HiMem was because I was an Amiga programmer and I'd never written any x86 code before I got there.

I actually worked on Windows 95 for about three or four months.

I was on the CommLA team doing the presentation cache, which is when you insert, say, an Excel spreadsheet or chart into a Word document, you don't want Excel to have to be loaded to render it every time, so there's a presentation cache of enhanced metafiles, and I was working on that.

So that shipped in Windows 95, but I moved to the Shell team about six months after getting to Microsoft, and so I worked on NT from there forward.

Windows 95 is an evolution of the original 16-bit Windows 3.1, which was the very first popular version of Windows.

And it adds 32-bit support and VXD drivers and a bunch of new technology and an entirely new user interface.

And it's something that at the time was revolutionary.

People lined up at night to wait in line to buy the thing.

I don't want to make it as basic as the start menu, but I think it's a big part of it.

I know when I first saw it, I couldn't quantify what about it was different and awesome, but I realized that I wanted to be a part of it.

And that's why I started writing a shell extension, which became zip folders at some point.

But I was just fascinated by the new shell.

And that's why I wound up working on the team that brought that shell over to the NT and what's Windows today.