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Dave Plummer

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
1147 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And at the time, encryption was like ammunition.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

So you couldn't just add encryption willy-nilly to various parts of the operating system.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

So we took out some things like that.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

Multi-volume support, I think, was taken out just to simplify it.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

It was really born out of the BBS era when people were dialing in on modems to download trialware and shareware and other things from BBSs online.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And to compress them, executables compressed about half their size.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

Other stuff compresses much more.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

But a guy named Phil Kass came up with a command line program for MS-DOS called PKZip, which was able to do compression of programs.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

He has a rather tragic arc, but it became ubiquitous in the entire PC industry, and pretty much everybody was using it.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

So when Windows came out, there was no way to open up a zip file, but everybody had been creating them for a decade.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And so that really drove the desire to have the zip support right into Windows.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

Yeah, and that's another piece of software that just kind of

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And it could be vastly improved, but you know, it was written in a single core day, so it doesn't do anything multithreaded.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And you've got a 96 core, 79, 95.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

Well, it uses one of them to unzip your file.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

I worked on the initial prototypes of Windows Media Center.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

So we did that in 96, I believe.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

And we didn't have, at the time, any sources.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#479 โ€“ Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories

So we had like a CD of MPEG video files of Raging Rudolph and I think the original South Park video, the Christmas one.