8 ms·
The Corvette that Windows zip folders bought
- saagarjha 3y ago> Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP. Of course, if you did that today Microsoft would probably sue you for competing with them.
- mh- 3y agoProbably not. > Keep in mind I'd asked for permission and got it in writing BEFORE I started. But yes, it was generous of MSFT to allow me that flexibility right from the first date of hire... source: https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1764646948769079705 https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1764646948769079705
- 10729287 3y agoAnd this is how, kids, generations of managers can’t find back their word and excel files they received zipped and edited in the doomed AppData Temp folder.
- TMWNN 3y agoI guess it was a fundamental mistake on Plummer's part to not make said temp directory read-only, to force people to copy files out of the folder before editing it?
- lozenge 3y agoI think, if you press "Open" in IE on the file download dialog, it goes to temp. Then, the default for zips is to extract to the same folder. So, the original mistake was offering people to open downloads without saving them first. I'm pretty sure they removed that later, around the time "mark of the web" was added (a metadata on downloaded files that triggered extra/different confirmation dialogs on opening the file).
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoThat 'mistake' has become so widely used and depended on, corporate IT departments complained so loudly that Microsoft was forced to add that feature into Edge after IE was retired. I'm not sure if it was backported to Chrome or remains an Edge-unique feature.
- anthk 3y agoGnome (Nautilus/Files) by default uncompress any file in the spot and you see the resulting folder at the side.
- wdfx 3y agoSo, the lesson here is to take something which you know to be a sub-optimal product, simultaneously sell and abandon it, and spend all the proceeds on luxury goods?
- iwanttocomment 3y agoNaah, dude really didn't have a choice here. His two options were to be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature... or he could sell them his app, which they would then functionally abandon, and he'd get enough money to buy a sweet 'Vette. There's an absurdity to that situation that says more about the Microsoft of the '90s than about anything this dude did.
- wdfx 3y agoThis is a fairer interpretation, thanks. > be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. If I had to bet, I'd say it's deliberate. It's Windows code, it works, and it still works. God knows what will break if you change that hallowed code.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThey could buy out 7zip, shove it into Windows install, and make the existing UI point to 7zip API calls instead of explorer.exe ones. A drop-in shim, that would improve quality of life for millions.
- kramerger 3y agoI wonder how much the winzip and winrar guys made
- royjacobs 3y agoAs soon as the first person registers WinRAR I'm sure they'll let you know!
- dist-epoch 3y agoUnfair, there are dozens of us who paid!
- gruturo 3y agoI'm aware of at least 2 people, one being myself.
- wongarsu 3y agoI also own one. It's the best file archiver for, well, archival, and the license really isn't that expensive. Also there was that one time last fall where they gave a meme website a discount code that brought the price down to €9.99 and sold 5000 licenses in a day.
- MikusR 3y agoHere, the same guy who wrote zip folders: https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1760716122591252882 https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1760716122591252882
- anthk 3y agoRAR as a library in games/media? Tons.
- victorstanciu 3y agoThis is the same Dave Plummer that also created the Task Manager. He also has a YouTube channel with a lot of nice tidbits like this about what it was like to work at MS back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage
- Dalewyn 3y agoAs I recall, he was also part of the team that wrote the Windows NT Start Menu by reimplementing the Windows 95 Start Menu which was written by an entirely different team.
- jmkni 3y agoHe also wrote a good book - https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Autistic-Millionaire-Everything-Aspergers/dp/B09KDYMF2R https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Autistic-Millionaire-Everythi...
- throwaway345353 3y agoHe was also fined by the Washington Attorney General for spreading malware. https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s-office-sues-settles-washington-based-softwareonlinecom https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
- xbar 3y agoRegistry Cleaner marketing was pernicious.
- narag 3y agoSome interesting videos there. I like those about minipcs.
- jdboyd 3y agoI thought his long interview with David Cutler was excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE
- skobes 3y agoToday, employment agreements usually say that the company owns anything you build, even "at home for fun", that overlaps with their business. Was this not the case at Microsoft in the 90s?
- throwuxiytayq 3y agoDo they really? Where do you live? I'd never sign a paper like that.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoThey're standard across almost all tech companies. Typically they're constrained to say that "anything you work on that's related to your job belongs to us"
- aquatica 3y agoIs this the case for Europe too?
- mrweasel 3y agoSome places yes. It's a little different, at least it has been in all my contracts. The company you work for has the rights to buy the software from you, at a reasonable price. If they don't want it, you free to do whatever. They can't just take it. I had colleagues would worked on a project in their space time, their price was reasonable wanting only compensation for the hours spend working on. The company didn't want it, but they also could not sell it, because if was so heavily tied into our systems and work flows that they couldn't reasonably sell it anywhere else. One of those developers then started working on another project, one that was so fare away from what we did that there was no way the company would want it and turned that project into a very successful business. In reality what happens is that people will work on something, quit, and the spend a few months on polishing and then release their project or sell it. Very few companies will want to spend time going after a former employee building some side business far removed from their core business.
- kjksf 3y agoIt's a great story but I can't think of it as an example of general financial illiteracy. Corvette lt1 is $70k which was $40k in 1993. It would be $780k today if invested in S&P 500. A nice retirement safety net. It would be $6 million today if invested in Microsoft stock. That's fuck you money. So kids, if you're young and have unexpected windfall, invest it at least in S&P 500 index. But I'm not surprised most people don't do that. I didn't at that age.
- sakopov 3y agoEh, not everything needs to be stashed away into stock market. Should also live your life a little. Plus, I'm sure Dave did well at Microsoft.
- willcipriano 3y agoI don't think this advice will be as valuable in a world that is dedollarizing as rapidly as this one.
- pavlov 3y agoYeah, nobody wants dollars anymore, they’re doomed. If you still have any laying around, you should wire them to me and I’ll dispose of that junk for free.
- willcipriano 3y agoCome back here in a few years, you'll find my prediction accurate. The position of the US is largely due to its ability to print money in the modern era and that era is ending. When company performance is largely determined by central bank interest rates you don't have a real economy.
- hluska 3y agoYou really don’t understand economics but define ‘few years’ and I’ll take the bet. I’d define few as “less than five”. Of course, this is the internet and rational people don’t talk like this.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> That *could* be fixed, but I imagine the sense is that anyone who's hardcore about their zip performance or feature set will likely be using 7-Zip or WinRAR, etc. On the contrary, power users like me use 7zip because built-in ZIP support is so slow. And the vast majority of regular users - they just silently suffer and use the slow-built in. (And I use 7zip because it's the least bullshit compressor/extractor I know - works perfectly fine through context menus, without having to ever look at the main UI. But you know what would be even less bullshit? The compress/extract functionality in explorer.exe! If only it wasn't dog slow...)
- shortrounddev2 3y agoI like peazip
- jeffgreco 3y agoAren't you both saying the same thing? Someone who cares about performance will use 7zip.
- mauriciob 3y agoNo, they’re saying that they would use the built-in ZIP support if it was performant enough. Since it isn’t performant due to design limitations, they have to use 7zip.
- DrammBA 3y agoIt's amazing how two people can make the exact same argument, yet argue as if they had opposing arguments.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI'm saying that approximately everyone cares about performance of this, or other functions of the OS. I'm using 7zip, even though I would prefer not to, but this is me solving the problem for myself. Most users are not capable or not in a position for this kind of self-help, so they're just silently suffering through.
- MikusR 3y ago
- newsclues 3y agoThe cars bought by id software from shareware money will always be the greatest in my mind.
- bluedino 3y agoI like the story about how Andy Hertzfeld 'sold' RMaker to Apple for one of the first LaserWriter printers ($7,000 USD in the early 80's) https://folklore.org/RMaker.html https://folklore.org/RMaker.html
- eschneider 3y agoMercifully, Apple gave certified developers half off for those printers. I remember getting a bank loan for the $3500 printer. It cost more than my car. :0
- swozey 3y agoI thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that they can send to customers vs 3rd partying it. But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.
- aidenn0 3y agoIf I finished writing a school paper too late into the night, I had to wait until morning to print it on my dot-matrix because it would wake the entire house up.
- emeril 3y agoI think they made special boxes you could put the printer in to attenuate the noise it made though generally closing the door of the room it was in was sufficient (this was whatever printer we had with an apple 2gs... probably some sort of imagewriter) and the print quality was relatively poor especially compared to laser mostly my siblings used it as they are older than me - I was able to use an inkjet (!) in future years and now rarely print anything other than return labels...
- duskwuff 3y agoThe LaserWriter was released in 1985, and was one of the first laser printers on the market (after the HP LaserJet a year earlier). It was a pretty big deal at the time.
- dist-epoch 3y agoThat's probably more money than the WinRAR people got :)
- King1st 3y agoThis Autistic hero has a youtube.
- neilv 3y agoIs that a personalized license plate?
- narag 3y agoNo, it's the random plate that came with the vehicle. (He tells that in another tweet) Edit: he also tells that he gets this question often.
- scaglio 3y agoI'm disappointed: I can't see any comments about the awful .zip file integration in modern Windows version. Extracting the files requires a pop-up or a non-intuitive context menu.
- jdboyd 3y agoIt sounds like it was the best it could reasonably be expected be back in the late 90s, and if it hasn't been improved sufficiently since then is probably not at all his fault.
- scaglio 3y agoYes, absolutely, I didn't mean to blame him. But from Windows 95 to 11 something could have been improved, from MS.
- 1000100_1000101 3y agoLast time I tried to use the built-in zip extraction was in XP, perhaps Win7. It was awful. It was slow. Unzipping archived source with thousands of files could take an hour or more... or 15 seconds via pkunzip. It didn't warn of corruption. Windows-unzip a corrupted file, and it will just stop at the point of corruption with no feedback, as though complete. Using pkunzip you'd get a warning about a corrupted file. Being that slow, and not reporting errors are two things that really aren't acceptable. I have no idea if it's improved since then.
- narag 3y agoI'm happy for him, but I dislike that extension. It's one of the first things I disable in a new Windows installation. I prefer to deal with compressed files explicitly.
- UberFly 3y agoI so agree. I've helped so many people that don't understand what a zipped archive is because they just open like any other folder, but only in windows explorer. I turn that nonsense off and explain to them the ins and outs.
- wongarsu 3y agoIt's in that awkward state where it kind of works and is really convenient, but you hit its limitations and general slowness all the time. It's good enough that it hasn't been replaced (say by an extension that employs a filter driver to make ZIPs truly behave like folders to all applications), but bad enough that it's annoying and most power users end up with 7Zip or WinRar instead.
- Lammy 3y ago> Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP. Added to my local Windows 95 software archive: http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/pier-10se/047/VZIP150/index.html http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/pier-10se/047/VZIP150/in... https://web.archive.org/web/19961228084852/http://visualzip.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961228084852/http://visualzip.... seems to have been archived after the software was already sold to MS. Its old TUCOWS download page suggests "Formerly ZIPExplorer" and it seems like that was in conflict with this ZipExplorer: https://web.archive.org/web/19980207094220/http://creative.net/~aeco/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980207094220/http://creative.n... I'll probably never use it over WinZip 6.2 or whatever but that's a nice story and it will be cool to see how it compares to the version that eventually shipped with the 98 Plus! pack.
- bc_programming 3y agoThis guy has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like he's grifting. Which isn't helped by the fact I've learned recently that apparently he literally did run a scam company and spread malware and got shut down by a state government, as other commenters have noted here. According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98755 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98... "Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking." Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft. Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!" It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there. According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own: History: Sep-26-96 Davepl Created (from old VZip code) This was a set of utility CIDL functions and not related to the zip functionality in Windows.
- noAnswer 3y agoThat is interesting. There is also his story about 64bit Space Cadet Pinball which got disproven by NCommander. No one said he was lying, but maybe misremembering things, because evidently there is a working 64bit Space Cadet Pinball version. But he blocked every attempt to engage.
- fennecbutt 3y ago>first, being 25+ year old code, it's single threaded. It doesn't matter how many CPU cores you have, it only uses one. Ah, yes, the reverse of the "Javascript changes too quickly and has too many libraries" problem; companies refusing to rewrite old code because "it still works". I feel like we should all be striving for the perfectly balanced as all things should be moments in development, code should never be left to languish for years without updates, but nor should it be updated when the wind changes.