Dave Plummer

And he's still, I think he's 85 now.

He still codes every day.

He's a Microsoft fellow.

As far as I know, he still goes into work.

Well, the dude's wicked smart, but he's also like a farmer.

He's like the guy that will follow you around and make sure that stuff gets done and gets done right to make sure that you're not checking any crap into his operating system and he won't tolerate it.

And he's a real taskmaster in that regard, but I think it really paid off because it was a very big paradigm shift for Microsoft developers to be subjected to the

Dave Cutler digital equipment style of leadership.

Tools are everything, I think, for one.

People are everything.

We'll just give that as a granted.

But the tool set is a huge factor.

If we would have had Git, it would have been immensely easier.

We were using diff and...

you know, manual deltas to do this porting and stuff.

So being able to fork a branch of source code would be a luxury that is new to me.

Well, what I was not present for was somebody was complaining.

A new hire came into the team and was working on what I believe was called Cairo.

And Cairo was going to be the next future operating system.

It was going to be beautiful and have a whole new user interface, newer than when it was 95.