Windows Task Manager

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

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Windows 10 task manager 2021-03-05
Windows 10 task manager

I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something...

[The following in written by David Plummer, the creator of Windows Task Manager.]

Figured I should write this stuff down before I forget it all, and where better for TaskManager than r/techsupport! If there's any appetite for this, I'll expand on it! I don't blog, so here goes...

Some Task Manager lore: I'm the Microsoft (Redmond, '93) developer that wrote TaskMgr at home in my den in about 1994 and then the NT silverback devs let me check it into the main tree even though I was a greenhorn at the time. So that meant I got to bring it into work and polish it up and make it an official part of Windows, where it remains to this day. So I got to define my own day job, actually, which was nice! I don't know if it's still like that, but great culture and people.

This is all based on XP, as I left long ago, but it's still the same core app underneath. In no particular order:

I also wrote/ported Space Cadet pinball, zip folders, worked on start menu, shell, calc, ole32, product activation, and some other stuff. I was in MS-DOS before that but I doubt anyone is still supporting MS-DOS!

Edit: Looks like comments have been locked, so I'll update this one time with some answers to the most interesting/common questions below!

[original source https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote_task_manager_and_i_just_remembered/]

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