They added ads to the start menu. Look how they massacred the wonderfully efficient start menu

It's so rare to get behind-the-scenes firsthand accounts from the actual people involved... thank you for making these!

"Software is like a sausage, maybe you just don't wanna know how it's made" Gold

I personally like the behind the scenes stories about product development that Dave Produces

For those that are curious about the green window: the windows behind me are powered by NightDriverLED.com and for some reason the green window kept losing WiFi and I couldn't tell until edited because it was all behind me... so I added the "No WiFi" logo when the window quits :-)

It was possible to change "START" to "STOP" or any other string 5 characters or less. The string is stored in explorer.exe which could be modified using a hex editor for instance. You had to copy explorer, rename it, edit it, delete the original and save the modified copy as explorer.exe. Upon reboot i was the coolest kid in 7th grade!

Blue...Folders...are...compressed. after nearly 20 years, I finally have the answer. It was a question from my childhood that was never truly answered. Thank you. I can now rest easy

12:08 “I’m never quite sure how my humor is received by some folks, so…” Too real Dave 😆

Being a teenager around the 95/NT era, I remember looking at NT3 and NT4 with excitement and awe. I would read magazines and articles about these powerful operating systems, imagining running them on my computer and using their tools. Operating Systems were exciting in a way they seldom are (if not entirely aren't) anymore.

Dave, man, this stuff is fascinating! The origins, the war stories, the history. And you deliver it all so entertainingly.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane Dave. I worked in building 17 for three years, having been transferred from Charlotte, NC to Seattle to work on the AnswerWizard(clippy). I was there from '94--98. I had forgotten about SLM until you mentioned it. I still remember going through one of the buildings and seeing all the versions of alternatives to Clippy that the animators had made for all the other languages of MS Office. The dolphin and secretary from the Japanese version always come to mind. And the different easter eggs for the Word and Excel versions were fun. I remembered the teams always tried to outdo each other to make the best ones with the least memory.

I'm an engineer and I really admire people who create daily use things. It was great to see how one of them has been developed. Most people are unaware how much technical knowledge and effort is underneath all those solutions. Thanks for sharing this great story!

As a kid in 1999, I had two things; a computer and a broken leg. That time stuck inside lead me to peruse a career in computers/software engineering. These videos are terrific at peeling back all the layers of things I used as a kid, but had no idea about. And the fact it’s from YOU Dave, it feels like I’m getting real inside baseball. Thank you for making these.

Dave, thank you for my childhood. Thank you for my adulthood watching these videos. Your legacy lives on and your hard work is truly appreciated. Thank you for everything.

Literally all the components that you have created are really important.. Start menu, Task bar, the "run" dialog. Thank you, I am the child of the 90s and been raised with the computers in some small city in the southern Russia :) Traveled the world a lot since then, but your memories make me feel like that curious kid from the 90s once again :)

I'm so very glad I discovered your channel. It's refreshing to hear from senior developers involved in architecture we depend on. I'm autistic myself. I often hear that we make natural programmers. Unfortunately, I'm struggling. Take good care.

Amazing episode as always, Dave! Thank you for sharing yet another chapter in the history archives

I have so much respect for developers like yourself. I can't code to save my life but I've had a love for computers all my life. It's just crazy how much discipline and mental energy it takes to write programs like yourself. Love your content!

Great behind the scenes stories! Using Windows all these decades, it's fun to discover you created a lot of the stuff we use.

You Sir, are history; in the nicest possible way. What a wonderful story told so humbly. Also, love the binary shirt! All the best to you and yours.👍👍👍

please continue this "Insider Secrets" series. First hand history lessons like this are fantastic!

Thanks for sharing, Dave! Love to listen to those stories about things we saw and used nearly every day.

Been using your creations every day now for decades without really giving a thought who was behind them ,I guess now is the time to say Thank you for all you brought to the community ! Thank you

This is amazing... being a behind the scenes look into the tech that influenced my life and made me want to get into tech 20 years ago. Thank you.

I find these videos fascinating for several reasons. Firstly, I really enjoy looking behind the scenes and seeing how things were/are made. This video struck another chord with me though. I'm an avid fiction reader and although there are dozens of books I love, the one I consider my absolute favourite is Microserfs by Douglas Coupland and that book is set at Microsoft HQ in 1994. This video gave me a deeper look into the place where the characters in my heart, Dan, Michael, Susan, Karla, Bug and all the others worked.

Thanks! I always enjoy these behind the scenes stories, learning about Easter Eggs, and the issues with porting code from ASCII to Unicode. I hope you keep sharing!

Loving the variety of your videos Dave. Keep up the excellent work!

These videos are an incredible look into such a cool and important part of tech history. Thanks so Much for making these!!

Everything you make is extremely historically significant. Thank you so much for making these.

I just discovered your channel. It's awesome to get a behind the scenes look at the operating systems that I grew up along side with. Thanks for sharing!

Great video, Dave. Please keep making them. It was interesting to hear all the challenges you had with Unicode.

Brilliant. I was a young help desk tech helping people through their computing experience.

Hey David! Thank you so much for sharing these stories. Wonderful to hear about development during the 90s era!

I'm loving these insider stories from Windows history! Many thanks for sharing. And it's good to know you have an excellent taste in cars as well!

Great work on the video. I always enjoy the backstories of computing history, and I look forward to more stories in the future. Your knowledge of how Windows does what it is does is always interesting.

Dave,... Conveying stories like this are very insightful, it also helps to attach some knowledge of how things were created, for those who are computer enthusiasts picking up knowledge and history like this is important because it provides a foundation and completes a more rounded education. I enjoy the stories.... and from another point of view..... You are documenting some history that may never be in textbooks. :-) Please, continue to bring us more behind-the-scenes stories.

I love these stories! To know that I’m working on a system this man and his team introduced long ago is fascinating to me. And when I was in my high school age I did take a few classes in Visual Basic. Among a few other programming languages so when I see code I can get the general gist of it. There are the most advance parts I can’t read but following the logic and reading the functions I can sort of almost understand. All of this is awesome stuff when I think about it. Keep up the great work on these videos! And I’ll keep coming back to watch again. 👍

Thanks Dave, I love these insider videos! I don't know if you already have done this, but I think it would be interesting to see you interview some of your former colleagues to get some more stories those bad old days.

I love your stuff Dave. It is inspiring to hear about your early career as I work myself to move into the software development field. It seems to be a hard skill to master, even coming from years of powershell and other scripting tools. Keep up the great content!

win95 osr1 you could click on the start button, and it would put a select box on it (as you see in the NT demonstration here). alt+space would pull up the right click menu, though right clicking would not pop it up. but the alt+space would open it, and the close option would be there. so, at bestbuy or whatever, we would screenshot demo machines, then make the screenshot as the wall paper, close the start button, and hide the task bar, and move all the icons out of frame (make a folder far away from the icons, then select all, drag till everything but the folder is off screen, then delete just the folder, but the folders still look like they're there. from the screenshot wallpaper. including the start button, which is closed. ;) very fun

Briefcase ... now that would be an interesting story, like, starting with what it was actually meant to be 😅

I really like your videos about the history of Windows and all the technical stuff, even though I don't understand most of it, it's fascinating to look back at how it all started with someone who helped to make it happen.

Oh, the memories (nightmares?) of my brief time working with SLM back in my early days at MS as a contractor in BackOffice. I really enjoy these walks down memory lane and hearing the stories. 💜 Thank you for sharing!

Congrats! This old histories are very good! When I see on the internet any Win NT stuff, I always think the NT box was beautiful, with this theme day becoming night, different from the cloud day from w98. I never understood why this, now I think NT was supposed to run at night on servers and w98 for the day on workstations😅

Once again, in my c. 1800s rocker, tea in hand, and I get the alert: a drop from The Garage is available. Oh boy! Win Start Menu...sure...let's watch. Turns out, I'm no vegetarian...and as a retired developer, I want to know what's in the sausage. Thanks Dave!

Thank you so much for sharing all this. I live for this kind of thing as a dev, (VR now) and hearing it from "the horse's mouth" so to say is incredible. Thanks again this is super inspirational Dave!!

Your stories of your time at MS as a neurodivergent are massively helpful in my fight against imposer syndrome from my ASD Dave. You improve my days indeed!

The Windows 95 shell update that came with MSIE 4.0 was magnificent. I loved the hover interface.

Hi Dave. I am one of the young men who built an IMSAI 8080. I still have it and I finished building it on July 4, 1975 in a cabin up in Big Bear. My questions are: 1. Do you remember Dr. Dobbs Journal of Calisthenics and Orthodontia (running light without over-byte)? Since I only had 56K ram, a 2K basic interpreter was too good to pass up. They had published a Tiny Basic, which I typed into my home-brew monitor which was stored into a 2708 EPROM. Oh my, how things have changed. 2. A by the way, I got a copy of MS Basic, at a time when I did not know who Microsoft was yet. The thing I was most impressed with was that it coded just like Basic Plus 2, for which I was developing utilities for our network (1 MBps DecNET) of PDP 11s. After watching your story about the early incarnation of MS Basic, now it all makes sense. 3. You mentioned the way to get the credits from the authors, but you did not mention how to invoke it in Windows 11. Would you be able to fill us in? 4. If you would be interested in my IMSAI (the real deal, not a simulator), I could be cajoled into parting with it for a small price. I have not powered it on in quite some time. It has 56K ram and an 8K EPROM board. A Tarbel Cassette interface, a home built (yes wire-wrapped) that interfaced with a printer that used a TTL parallel interface without buffering. I wrote what turned out to be "double buffering" since the printer would stop accepting data during CR-LFs, before I knew the term double buffering. The IMSAI brought me to a career spanning from 1975 until this year as I retired. Thanks for all your most curious stories, Marc

These behind the scenes videos are all kinds of interesting! Thank you for sharing!

Love this stuff. Please keep making these, they are fascinating. Thank you!!!

Damn it’s so satisfying to learn about things we’ve all been using since our childhood. I just finished watching the task manager video. Great video Dave!

Love the history Dave. As an inventor of data compression algorithms, I love the story of Zip folders in particular. It makes me look fondly back three decades to a time when everything felt so very new. Thanks again!

I always enjoy seeing the behind the scene look at how things are made with computers. Keep up the good work man.

Keep up the great work on informing us all 😊

I would love to hear your experiences with the changes to the file system as MS moved from 8.3 to todays long filenames. Seems to me there must be plenty of interesting stories. Cheers!

Love the binary shirt. Any chance of a link to where you got hold of it?

DOS through early versions of Windows was my youth, your videos have been so fascinating to watch, a unique perspective and insight into things others on the outside looking in could never provide.

These videos are absolutely fascinating. Thanks for posting them.

Dude! I WANT THAT SHIRT! Please tell me where you got it!

Great video! I'm somewhat confused by one thing though, you describe the NT Cairo shell as being seperate from the earlier Windows 95 one and competing, but I'm fairly sure I've seen that same shell in the very earliest publicly available Windows 95 betas. I always figured the final Windows 95 shell one was simply an evolution from this early design, is this not the case?

Love seeing your videos when they first come out! Cheers and thanks for continuing to post great content.

You've made (or worked on) so many parts of the OS that I use daily, I both congratulate and thank you.

11:15 what’s that funny box in the upper right? Asking for a friend….. Glen

Dude, you wrote pinball? I got banned from my school's computer lab for playing that on lab's computer.. good old times

Dude- I am SO glad I found your channel! I can remember loving NT 3.51 back in the day- so solid compared to Win3.1 and then 95. I can remember buying a copy of NT 4.0 when it was released- so wild hearing these stories.

This is amazing. These are genuinely amazing. Thank you for these videos, they are a real treasure. :)

*I just want to know if there'll ever be a new OS that works as intuitively and flawlessly as Windows 7. I bought Win 8 and hated it. I upgraded to Win 10 or whatever it was and hated it. I just want something that works like 7 so I can actually find things and work with it. I don't want resource-hogging, distracting active tiles all over the place, and I want a task bar to open programs, and the ability to have a hundred or more tabs open and be able to find them. I'm a desktop guy, not a "smart" phone guy. I use a trackball, and don't want to pinch and scroll my way around!*

Thank you for these videos, they are actually pretty intriguing. I never knew you worked on zip compression at all, now i gotta go find that video too!

I enjoy these talks as I spent 2 years at Florida Computer & Business School studying Windows and computer repair. That was many years ago but your videos add the missing link of the human dimension that was not and could not be taught in those classes. Thanks for taking the time to record these videos.

These are great!!! I'm a hobby developer and love learning the history behind the software and tools i still use today. Keep making these vids!!! 😁

Really appreciate the trip down memory lane. I spent a lot of time with sustained engineering work and debugging odd customer problems, but these stories were the fun part of the code. As odd as it sounds, I always rather enjoyed browsing the code to find those debug mode flags the devs left in the code in retail build. Definitely helpful for those "that is never supposed to happen" situations.

Amazing! Thank you, sir. Not only for your work but also for sharing this amazing piece of computer history!

Dave, there are thousands of people that have stories like your in tech and programming but you are the ONLY one that is gracious enough to SHARE!!!

I love your looks back at the work you did at Microsoft. Great episode!

Thank you for making these... Really love the history and details..

Excellent video Dave. Always fascinating to hear how things came about.. Thanks!!

Thanks for another amazing video, Dave! 🌟

Dave you are such a humble legend! You have no idea how great this content is.

Thank you Dave, and the rest of the team for bringing us one of the most revolutionary OS's of all time. The first job I had out of college was tech support & domain administration on NT Server 4 & SCO Unix systems. I always felt lucky I got into the industry at that moment. I always loved the start menu on the NT systems, truly inspired work!

Your shirt is awesome! Love hearing your stories! ^-^

Thanks for the video Dave!

Thanks Dave. Ive always loved the start menu. :D

Really fascinating to learn about the history of the tools I used to work with back in the days. Cheers from Sweden!

I love these stories. Thank you for sharing.

I have enjoyed these back stories. Thanks Dave!

It's so beautifully nostalgic... I used to work for Dell desktop support... 20 years have flown by... ❤

I love listening to these videos in the background. Another good video!

Your videos are so well made and fascinating to watch! They will go down as real gems in computer history!

More please, Dave. Thanks for the stories. Excellent.

Amazing!! Thanks Dave!

Another brilliant behind the scene. I really enjoy Windows 98, 2000, XP and 7. Im still rocking a Windows 2000 Pro PC for my retro gaming and my classic Visual Studio 6.0 for retro programming. Dave please share more insights/behind the scenes. Thank you sir.

Absolutely Fantastic! If I can make it, I'll be eagerly looking for some of your LED displays as well. Please keep up these fun history sessions.

Recently found this channel and absolutely loving the no bloat content. 🙌💪🏼

It's always a joy to watch your stories from your time at Microsoft.

Love these sorts of videos. Keep 'em coming. Thanks.

Love your work Dave, both then and now.

This is my favourite style of video from you, thankyou

amazing! , i supported and have used systems from dos/3.1 all the way through all windows OS's to today, fascinating listening to someone who coded windows and the features ive used for decades, thanks for making these vids!! 😁👍

Genuinely enjoy these episodes, both on the task manager and this one on the start menu. I remember, I think it was back when the original age of empires was released (I think I was about 9 or 10), wondering who wrote the code for "all the things in windows". Feel good throwback. I think I ran AOE on our first pentium computer with windows 95 that could connect through modem to the internet. "ARE YOU ON THE INTERNET AGAIN" when someone in the household picked up the phone.