Dave Plummer

speaker

1,147 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Dave Plummer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · 29 Aug 2025 podcast

I used to volunteer teaching computer science at my kids' school, you know, for the third graders and stuff.

So it's more like logging in than computer science.

But, uh...

The kids, of course, all their dads work at Microsoft, so nobody's impressed by anything you do.

But one of the kids found out I worked on pinball, and then they were like, whoa, you worked on pinball?

Because they all knew that in those days.

Now the kids are probably aged out.

They don't know it anymore.

But for a brief period.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

So they came to me late in the XP ship process.

I don't know if the beta had gone out.

I don't think the beta had gone out yet, but they had intended to take the Office activation code and then adapt it to Windows and add activation to Windows.

But whoever was responsible for doing it had slipped it enough times that it wasn't going to happen.

And so I had kind of a reputation for being able to fix things quickly.

So they came to me and said, can you get this done in time for XP?

I don't know, but I'll try.

So with the help of the guys that were doing the DRM stuff on the DRM side and the research guys doing the math for the product keys and everything else, we cranked it out in time for XP.

And I don't know what actual impact is for revenue, but I imagine it's substantial when you start enforcing license keys.

I wonder what it is.

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