#479 – 戴夫·普卢默：编程、自闭症与微软旧日往事

以下是与戴夫·普拉默的对话，他是一位程序员，也是微软的老牌软件工程师，曾参与Windows 95、NT和XP的开发，打造了许多令人惊叹的工具，其中一些如著名的Windows任务管理器，已被数亿人持续使用。没错，就是Windows任务管理器。还有Windows中的zip解压缩支持功能。他还将《太空军校生弹珠台》（即3D弹珠台）的代码移植到了Windows平台。

The following is a conversation with Dave Plummer, programmer and an old school Microsoft software engineer who helped work on Windows 95, NT, and XP, building a lot of incredible tools, some of which have been continuously used by hundreds of millions of people, like the famed Windows task manager. Yes. The Windows task manager. And the zip unzip compression support in Windows. And he ported the code for Space Cadet Pinball, aka three d Pinball to Windows.

如今，他因其精彩的YouTube频道“Dave's Garage”而深受众多程序员和工程师喜爱，你绝对应该去看看。此外，他还写了一本关于自闭症及其人生故事的书《自闭症百万富翁的秘密》，书中提供了关于如何在自闭症背景下处理人际关系、职业和日常生活的有趣见解。综合这些因素，这是一次关于编程、计算、技术历史与未来，以及在传说中的车库中打造酷炫事物的超级有趣对话。现在，快速提一下我们的赞助商。

Today, he's loved by many programmers and engineers for his amazing YouTube channel called Dave's Garage. You should definitely go check out. Also, he wrote a book on autism and about his life story called secrets of the autistic millionaire, where he gives really interesting insights about how to navigate relationships, career, and day to day life with autism. All this taken together, this was a super fun conversation about the history and future of programming, computing, technology, and just building cool stuff in the proverbial garage. And now, a quick few second mention of your sponsor.

详情请查看描述或访问lexfreedman.com/sponsors。这是支持本播客的最佳方式。我们有Uplift Desk，这家了不起的公司长期为我提供所有办公室和袖珍工作室家具。Zogdoc是一个连接患者与顶级医疗保健提供者的平台。Fin是用于客户服务的AI代理。

Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Uplift Desk, which is an incredible company that has been my go to for a long time for all my office and pocket studio furniture. Zogdoc, which is a platform that connects patients with top rated healthcare providers. Fin for AI agent for customer service.

Alio Capital面向那些了解全球市场动荡的人。最后是Shopify，我们曾与DHH讨论过二十小时的公司，因为他们使用Ruby on rails并证明了其可扩展性。总之，明智选择吧朋友们，现在进入正题。我尽量让赞助内容有趣，但如果你跳过，请务必看看赞助商。我喜欢他们的东西，也许你也会。

Alio Capital for folks who understand the turmoil of global markets. And finally, Shopify, a company that we've talked about for twenty hours with DHH, because they use Ruby on rails and they show that it can scale. Anyway, choose wisely my friends and now onto the full batteries. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.

如需联系我，无论何种原因，请访问lexfreedman.com/contact。好了，开始吧。本集由一家我赞不绝口的公司赞助。事实上，今天我收到了Uplift desk的另一张桌子。

To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfreedman.com/contact. Alright. Let's go. This episode is brought to you by a company that I cannot sing enough praises to. In fact, today, I got another desk from Uplift desk.

我拥有的桌子数量，它们带给我的快乐是无法估量的。正如我所说，它是我所有办公室和播客工作室家具的首选。我有一张放Linux主机的桌子，一张放Windows主机用于编辑的桌子。还有一张桌子上放着我正在研究的四足机器人——一个大四足机器人和一个小型四足机器人宝宝。

The number of desks I have, the amount, the quantity of joy they bring to my life is immeasurable. Like I said, it's my go to for all office and podcast studio furniture. I have a desk with a Linux box, I have a desk with a Windows box I do editing on. I have a quadruped sitting on top of another desk that I'm working on. There's a there's a big quadruped, and it's it's a four legged robot, and then there's a mini baby quadruped.

它们都放在桌子上，我正在研究它们，它们连接到Linux主机，但需要频繁拆装。当然还有播客中你看到的那种木质色调的播客桌。我有三张这样的桌子，已经使用多年。早在Uplift desk成为赞助商之前很久很久就在用了。今天我又在播客工作室添置了一张新桌子，那里有更多机器人、Linux笔记本，我正在那里进行更多机器人相关的开发工作。

They're they're both sitting on the desk, and I'm working on them, and it's connecting to the Linux box, but there's a lot of I have to take them apart. I have to bring them back together. And then, of course, the podcast desk that you see on the podcast, that sort of woody color. I have three of those desks, and I've been using that for many years. Long, long, long, long, long before Uplift desk was a sponsor, and I just got a new desk today in the podcast studio where I have some more robots, Linux laptop, and I was doing some more development to do some robotics related stuff in the podcast studio.

总之，这些都是升降桌。可定制的选项多得惊人。我可以为这些家伙担保——好人、好桌子、好人体工学设计，简直太棒了。访问upliftdesk.com/lex并使用代码lex，可获赠四件免费配件、免费当日送货、免费退货、15年保修以及额外订单折扣。就是upliftdesk.com/lex。

Anyway, the these are standing desks. You can customize the amount of options, it's incredible. I can vouch for these guys. Good people, good desks, good ergonomics, just incredible. Anyway, go to upliftdesk.com/lex and use code lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a fifteen year warranty, and an extra discount off your entire order that's upliftdesk.com/lex.

本集也由Zocdoc赞助，这是一个连接患者与顶级医疗保健提供者的平台。如果你像我一样总忘记在问题恶化前看医生——你知道，体检、确保一切正常这些事我总是不做，并且非常焦虑。焦虑的主要原因，至少在我看来，是缺乏找医生的工具——那种易用、快速、高效、可访问且选择众多的工具。而Zocdoc在这方面做得极其出色，我推荐他们，这是我找医生和医疗保健提供者的首选平台。

This episode is also brought to you by Zocdoc, a platform that connects patients with top rated healthcare providers, if you're anything like me remembering to go see a doctor before things go terribly wrong. You know, checkups, making sure everything's okay is is a thing I just don't do, and I'm very stressed about. And really the main reason for the stress is because, at least in my perception, a lack of tooling for finding a doctor, for having easy to use, fast, efficient, accessible, huge number of choices, tooling. Okay? And so ZocDog does that incredibly well, I can recommend them, that's my go to place to find a doctor, to find a healthcare provider.

说这些话正在激励我自己去做检查，因为我很久没看医生了。希望我的话能激励我，或许也能激励你——如果你像我一样一直回避这个问题，因为总觉得没事直到某天出事。到那时你会后悔没早点访问zocdoc.com/lex。就是z0cd0c.com/lex。本集还由Finn赞助，这是一款世界级的热门客户服务AI代理，受到5000名客户服务主管的信任。

Me saying these words is motivating me to do so because I haven't seen a doctor in quite a while, and so hopefully my words motivate me and perhaps even motivate you if you're anything like me and have been avoiding this topic because everything's gonna be fine until it's not. One day it's not going to be fine and you're going to regret not going to zocdoc.com/lex. That's z0cd0c.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Finn, a world class popular AI agent for customer service. They are trusted by 5,000 customer service leaders.

它们甚至获得了包括Anthropic和Synthesia在内的顶级AI公司的信任，这就是它们可信的证明。当一家正规AI公司委托你的AI公司为其处理AI事务时，这便验证了你的专业性。平均59%的问题解决率，90天内最高100万美元退款保证。其核心是Fin AI引擎——一个持续优化的系统，能让你不断循环分析、训练、测试、部署，使系统越来越智能，最终让客户满意。

They're even trusted by top AI companies including Anthropic and Synthesia. That's how you know they're legit. When a legit AI company trusts your AI company to do some AI thing for you, that's how you know you're legit. 59% average resolution rate, ninety day money back guarantee up to $1,000,000. It's powered by the Fin AI engine, which is a continuously improving system that allows you to analyze, train, test, deploy, and repeat that loop over and over and over until the thing gets smarter and smarter and smarter, and your customers are happy.

访问fin.ai/lex了解如何变革客户服务并扩展支持团队。网址是fin.ai/lex。本期节目也由Alio Capital赞助，这款应用让我特别兴奋，因为不仅我在使用它，还通过它学习投资知识。这款投资应用由深谙全球市场与日益分裂世界宏观经济的人士设计——正如我之前提到的，这种分裂体现在政治、社会和经济层面。

Go to fin.ai/lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin dot a I slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Alio Capital, a company, an app that I'm especially excited about because not only am I using it, I'm learning about investment from it. It's an investment app that's designed by people who understand global markets and the macroeconomics of a world that is increasingly becoming divided. As I've mentioned before, politically divided, socially, economically divided.

Allio由Altitude AI驱动，能实时识别通胀、利率和全球风险变化，并相应调整你的投资组合。如果你的投资工具没有加入这剂AI调味料，你可能错过了这个AI飞速进化的领域。我认为使用至少部分依托AI的投资工具非常明智。Alio Capital在这方面表现卓越，适合主动型或被动型投资者——设置后即可忘记，不必焦虑，只需知道投资交给了可靠平台。可通过应用商店、Google Play下载，或发送Lex至511511。

Allio is powered by Altitude AI, which identifies shifts in inflation, interest rates, and global risks, and then adapts your portfolio in real time. If your investment tooling doesn't have a little bit of the AI spice in that delicious recipe, I suspect that you might be missing out on the quickly evolving space where AI is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. So I think it's very wise to be using tooling that's leveraging at least in part AI for doing the investment. Alio Capital does that extremely well, and is doing so for hands on or hands off investors, set it and forget it, try not to think about it, it all stresses me out, I just wanna know that whatever investment I'm doing is in good hands. Anyway, download their app in the app store, Google Play, or text Lex to 511511.

Alio Capital（拼写为a l l I o），发送Lex至511511。哦，还有这句免责声明：投资存在风险，可能损失本金。历史表现不预示未来结果。详见条款细则，可能产生税费。最后朋友们，本期节目也由Ruby on Rails赞助。

That's a l l I o capital, text Lex to 511511. Oh, and here comes the one small print thing I'm supposed to say, investing involves risks including the potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee results. See terms and conditions, tax fees may apply. And finally, friends, this episode is brought to you by Ruby on Rails.

开个玩笑。实际赞助商是Shopify——这个平台能让任何人通过精美网店随处销售。为什么提到Ruby on Rails？如果你想见证爱情，甚至重新坠入爱河，不妨收听我与DHH六小时的对话，他阐述了对Ruby语言的深爱，以及这种热爱如何催生出传播世界之美的Ruby on Rails。

No. I'm just kidding. It's brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed to anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Why do I mention Ruby on Rails? If you're not familiar and you wanna know what love is, you wanna watch somebody fall in love and maybe you yourself fall in love all over again, then listen to the six hour conversation with DHH, where he elucidates his deep love for the Ruby language, and why that makes his creation of Ruby on Rails a continuation of the beauty that he spreads throughout the world.

Shopify CEO Toby Ludwig显然也看到了Ruby on Rails的这种美，据我所知Shopify大量基础设施基于此框架。Toby和团队出色证明了其扩展性——他是真正深入代码层的工程师型领导者，这种既能编码又通晓各环节运作的领袖令人钦佩。我曾与Toby相处，他同时也是个能在技术与哲学间自如切换的可爱之人，这类对话总是充满乐趣。

Anyway, the CEO of Shopify, Toby Ludwig, clearly saw the same kind of beauty in Ruby on Rails and that's why so much of the software infrastructure of Shopify as far as I understand is done on Ruby on Rails and Toby and the Shopify team have been really good at showing that the thing scales. I mean, he's a legit engineer. An engineer, design, a leader that goes to the ground floor and still is coding, still wants to understand how every piece works. It's really incredible. I love those kinds of leaders and I got a chance to hang out with Toby, and he's also just a sweet person and a mind that goes effortlessly between the technical and the philosophical, which is some of the most fun people to talk to.

现在你可以通过shopify.com/luxe（全小写）享受1美元/月试用期，立即将业务提升至新高度。这里是Lex Friedman播客，支持我们请查看简介中的赞助商或访问lexfreedman.com/sponsors，欢迎订阅、评论并分享给可能感兴趣的朋友。

Anyway, you, my friend, can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/luxe. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/luxe to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors, and consider subscribing, commenting, and sharing podcast with folks who might find it interesting.

现在有请Dave Plummer。还记得你的第一台电脑吗？我记得——虽然很久之后才拥有，但

And now, dear friends, here's Dave Plummer. Tell me about your first computer. Do you remember? I do. I didn't own my first computer for a long time,

我使用的第一台电脑是TRS-80 Model I Level I 4K机型。五年级或六年级时（大约11岁），我骑车到当地Radio Shack。那里除了音响设备，还有堆标着‘电脑’的箱子。我向店员询问时，他们说刚到货还没组装。当时我挺早熟，就说‘我来帮你们组装吧’。

but the first computer I ever used was a TRS 80 model one level one four k machine. And I rode my bike in fifth or sixth grade, so was about eleven to the local Radio Shack. And you know, they had the standard component stereo systems, everything else Radio Shack had, but they had a stack of boxes that was labeled computer. And so I was asking the people that worked there about it, and they said, just got it, and they hadn't set it up yet. And so I was rather precocious, and I figured, well, I'll set it up for you.

他们回答：‘行，试试看。’

And they said, okay, have a shot.

你知道自己在做什么吗？

Did you know what you were doing?

完全不知道。我是说，这不会比组合音响更糟。唯一的问题是，Tandy公司以其无限的智慧，对电源、视频和卡带使用了相同的五针DIN接口，所以它们看起来一模一样。如果插错了，就会把它炸掉。所以我仔细看了标签。

Absolutely not. I mean, it's no worse than a component stereo. The only thing is that Tandy and their infinite wisdom used the same five pin DIN connector for power, video, and I think cassettes, so they're all identical. And if you plug them in wrong, you'd blow it up. So I read the label.

然后让它运转起来，开始摆弄它，对电脑一无所知。所以我往里面输入英文命令，你知道，输入'print two plus two'能完美运行，但用这种基础的一级解释器输入更简单的英文是走不了多远的。

And got it working, wound up playing with it, and not knowing anything about computers. So I'm typing English commands into it, and you know, print two plus two works perfectly, yet more simple in English that you enter into a basic level one interpreter is not gonna get you very far.

所以你是在尝试用英语和它交流。

So you're trying to talk to it in English.

是啊，当时不懂。我现在还留着六年级写的一个程序草稿，逻辑上勉强说得通，但在当时任何解释器上都不可能运行成功。我花了好一阵子才搞明白它们到底是怎么回事。不过我每周四和周六都骑车去那里，他们很慷慨地让我使用那些机器。

Yeah. Didn't know any better. And I still have an old full scap that I wrote in sixth grade of a of a program that's kind of illogically correct, but has no chance of working on any interpreter that existed at the time. So it took me a while to figure out what was actually going on with them. But I rode my bike down there every Thursday and Saturday, and they graciously let me use the machines.

这是什么时候的事？79或80年吧。

When was this? 7980.

明白了。那时候的计算技术发展到什么水平了？我们具体在讨论什么？

Okay. What was the state of the art of computing back then? So what are we talking about?

嗯，当时三大机型已经面世。有TRS-80 Model I，PET 02/2001，还有Apple II差不多同时推出的。Apple II。

Well, the big three had come out. There was a TRS 80 model one. There was the PET 02/2001, and the Apple two came out roughly simultaneously. Apple two.

你会说这是有史以来最伟大的电脑吗？

Would you say that's the greatest computer ever built?

事后看来可能是。不过我觉得这个称号应该给Commodore 64。

Probably in retrospect. Well, I would probably give that to the Commodore 64.

是啊，我们在这点上看法一致。那是我第一台电脑，可能是在它发布多年后才拥有的。但没错，Commodore 64确实了不起。不过Apple II对个人电脑历史的影响确实巨大。

Yeah. You and I agree on this. That was my first computer, probably many years after it was released. But yeah, Commodore 64 is incredible. But yes, Apple two had a huge impact on the history of personal computers.

对，这很难

Right. It's hard

衡量长期影响，但我认为64本身可能影响了更多人，这就是我选择它的原因。

to gauge the long term impact, but I think the 64 itself probably influenced more people, so that's my reason for picking that one.

你这么认为？销量确实更高。Commodore 64卖出了很多台。

You think so? The sales are certainly higher. So Commodore 64 sold a lot.

是啊，那些数字简直难以置信。

Yeah. I mean, the numbers are hard to believe.

取决于你相信哪个数据，但即便是中间值估计也相当高。好吧，酷。所以你最终升级到了Commodore 64。跟我聊聊那台机器吧。

It depends which numbers you believe, but even the medium estimates are pretty high. Alright. Cool. So you eventually graduated to the Commodore 64. Like, tell me about that machine.

你在Commodore 64上都做些什么？

What did you do on the on the Commodore 64?

呃，我做的第一件事就是把它的软驱给烧坏了，这很不幸因为这不是保修机。我父母当时没什么钱，所以我们是从Computer House买的，而不是大零售商。这意味着它坏掉后得寄回德国之类的地方修理。于是我就没了软驱，只能用磁带机——这在当时已经是最好的选择了。我写些小程序，还有个能从磁带加载的机器语言监视器。没有内置汇编器，但有反汇编器，所以可以用十六进制输入6502的操作码。

Well, the first thing I did was overheat the floppy drive on it, which is unfortunate because it wasn't a warranty machine. We had my parents didn't have a lot of money, so we bought it from Computer House as opposed to one of the major retailers, which meant when it died, it had to go back to Germany or something to be fixed. So I was left with no floppy, and so I had a cassette deck, which was the best you could do at the time. And so I was writing small things, and I had a machine language monitor that you could load from cassette. Didn't have an assembler built in, but had a disassembler, so you could enter the op codes in sixty five zero two in hex.

如果规划得仔细，你就能写出些基础程序。我就是这样入门的。我在上面写的第一个程序是《Galaga》的克隆版。虽然是个很烂的克隆，但主要敌人会随时间推移发动攻击。全部是用手工编写的机器语言写的，而且6502不能重定位。

And if you were careful about planning, you'd be able to write some basic programs. So that's kinda how I learned. And the first thing I ever wrote on it was a clone of Galaga. Now it's a bad clone of Galaga, but it has the major enemies that attack over time. And it's all written in hand coded machine language, and you can't relocate sixty five zero two.

所以如果你要在中间添加代码，就得手动跳转到别处，做完工作再跳回来。简直就是可怕的意大利面条式代码。但最后居然都能运行。我还做了备份想留给未来的学者什么的——天知道我当初在想什么。好吧。

So if you need to add code in the middle, you need to manually sort of jump to somewhere else, do your work, jump back to where you were. It's just hideous spaghetti code. But it all worked eventually. And I went to make a backup of it to preserve it for future scholars or whatever the hell I was doing. Okay.

然后我把空白软盘的内容复制到了数据软盘上。那就是我第一次接触数据管理的经历。所以我再也没有我第一个程序的副本了。

And I copied my blank floppy onto my data floppy. So that was my first experience with data management. And so I don't have a copy of my first program anymore.

那种感觉是怎样的，你还记得吗？就是做了件，恕我直言，有点蠢的事？这其实也是编程体验的一部分。

What was that feeling like, do you remember, of of just doing something, if I may say so, like stupid, you know? Which is a part of the programming experience.

是啊。当时充满了愧疚感，因为你毁掉了几个星期的工作成果，而且你知道是因为自己太匆忙，或者做了蠢事，做出了不明智的选择。

Yeah. There was a huge amount of guilt because, right, you destroy several weeks of work, and you know it was because you rushed, or you did something stupid, you made an unwise choice.

等等。能详细说说当时的编程情况吗？所以真的是机器语言？连汇编语言都算不上？

Wait. Wait. Can you tell me about the programming involved in that So it's literally machine language. So machine so it's not even assembly.

还不是汇编，因为系统里还没有汇编器。我本应该先写个汇编器作为第一个任务的，但当时没那么聪明，所以...

Not assembly yet, because there's no assembler built in. So I should have run an assembler written an assembler as my first task, but I wasn't that clever, so

写汇编器有多难？小菜一碟吧？

How hard is that to do? Trivial.

我觉得这种事会让人印象深刻。你反复犯同样的错误。比如C语言里有些语法问题，一旦犯错就永远忘不掉。对，这就是其中之一。

And it's one of those things that sticks, I think. You do it so many times. You know, if I give you a c issue, there are certain syntactic issues in c that you're never gonna forget and get raw. Yeah. And it's just one of those.

那么用机器码编程对程序员来说最大的限制是什么？

Like, what are then the limitations of programming in machine code as a programmer?

最大的问题是必须完全按顺序编写。至少在6502这种架构下，你无法后期插入代码，只能在末尾添加。某种程度上就像在磁带上编程。

The biggest issue is you have to write completely sequentially because at least in that variant sixty five zero two, you can't add things later. You can only add things on the end. So it's like programming a tape in a way.

你用机器语言写过最复杂的程序是什么？

What was the most complicated thing you've built with machine language?

那款游戏应该算是——我是说，用汇编语言的话，我做过不少复杂的东西。但用真正的机器语言，我想那游戏可能是我唯一实际完成的作品。

That game would be I mean, in assembly language, I've done a fair bit of complicated stuff. But in actual machine language, I think that game would be the only thing I've actually

你可是实实在在地开发了一款游戏。

You literally built a game.

不算多出色，但能运行。好吧。

Not a great game, but it worked. K. Alright.

然后你把它删了。确实删了。那么，你是什么时候第一次爱上编程的？当你意识到，这玩意儿很特别的时候。

And then you erased it. I did. Alright. When did you first fall in love with programming? When you figured out, like, this is a this is something special.

我觉得对我来说分两个阶段。从TRC-80一代机开始，我就立刻对这些机器着迷了。我唯一想做的就是骑车去那里，花更多时间捣鼓它。我也确实这么做了，直到人家都不太欢迎我了。另一个顿悟时刻是在大学二三年级，那时我意识到：我热爱编程，却完全不知道未来要做什么。

I think there was two stages for me. I always knew immediately that I fascinated with these machines from the TRC 80 model one. It's all I wanted to do is ride my bike back there and have more time with it. And I did that, you know, to wear out my welcome as much as I could. And the other revelation came, I think, about second or third year university when I realized, I love programming, but I have no idea what I'm gonna do.

是去某个地方让录像机的12点闪烁？还是去开发操作系统？毕业后到底要做什么我毫无头绪。但我热爱正在做的事，这给了我很大安慰。

Am I gonna make the 12 flash on a VCR somewhere? Or am I gonna go work on an operating system? I have absolutely no idea what I'm gonna do post graduation. But I love what I do. And so, I think that was a lot of consolation.

就像，具体做什么其实不重要，因为我就是喜欢做这些事。

It's like, it doesn't really matter what I'm doing at this point, because I kinda love doing it, so

所以船到桥头自然直？对，只要跟随这种感觉，

So you'll figure it out? Yeah. As long as you're following this kind of feeling,

我就知道自己终于找对方向了。是的。

this I know I was in the right area, finally. Yeah.

明白了。你高中辍学了。

Alright. You dropped out of high school.

是啊，这可不是明智之举。好吧。

Yeah. Not the smartest move. Okay.

但你最终重返校园并取得了学业上的巨大成功，总体而言，作为一名程序员、开发者、软件创造者都非常成功。你是如何找到方向的？能讲讲辍学后又重新找回道路的历程吗？

But you ended up going back to school and being very successful at school, and just in general, successful as a programmer, a developer, as a creator of software. How were you able to find your way? Can you tell that journey of dropping out and then finding your way back?

并没有某个明确的辍学时刻。你只是去学校的次数越来越少，直到意识到再去会很尴尬，因为已经很久没露面了。很快，你干脆就不去了——这就是我高中辍学的方式。所以如果你发现自己正走在这条路上，赶紧停下。但当时的我恰恰就是这么做的。

There's no moment when I dropped out. You just go less and less and less until you realize it's gonna be embarrassing if I show up because I haven't been there in a long time. And then pretty soon, you're just not going, and that's how you drop out of high school. So if you find yourself on that path, stop doing that. But that's precisely what I did.

于是我不上学了，必须找份工作。我在7-11便利店和油漆仓库之类的地方打工。其实7-11的工作挺有意思，他们总在轮换那些足够聪明能做夜班的人——既要处理账目又要做行政工作，夜班要干的活很多，但这些人都有不得不在7-11工作的个人原因。我就是其中之一，因为我没有高中文凭。

And so now, I'm not at school, and I have to get a job. So I'm working at seven Eleven, and a paint warehouse, and stuff like that. And seven Eleven is actually kind of an interesting job because it's a job I think they keep rotating for people that are smart enough to do the night shift with all the accounting and the administration, stuff they make the night shift do, but that have reasons personally that they need to work at seven Eleven. And I was one of those people because I had no high school diploma.

在7-11工作期间有哪些难忘的时刻？这份工作的艰辛让你领悟到了什么？

What are some memorable moments from that time at seven Eleven? Maybe what do you appreciate about the difficulty of that job?

对我来说最糟的可能是...虽然被持刀抢劫什么的也挺刺激，但最恶心的是测油尺。我们要用一根15到20英尺（约4.5-6米）长的木尺，上面标着英寸和英尺刻度。把它插进汽油罐再抽出来，根据汽油浸湿的位置读数——因为根本没有电子传感器。

Probably the worst moment for me. I mean, I got held up at knife point and stuff, that's all entertaining. But the worst the most the the suckiest part for me was doing the gas dips. We've got a long it's like a 15 or 20 foot wooden stick, and it's measured in gradients of inches and feet. And you drop it into the gasoline tanks, then you bring it up and you measure where the gasoline sits because there's no electronic sensor.

嗯。我第一次操作时失手掉了测油尺，赶紧去抓——结果手上扎了上千根木刺，当时气温零下40度（约零下40摄氏度），简直糟透了。哦天，那一刻我意识到：绝不能一辈子干这个。

Mhmm. So I'm doing that, and the first time I do it, I drop the pole, and I regrab it. Well, that's about a thousand splinters of wood into your hands, and it's 40 below out, and that really sucked. Oh, wow. I realized, I don't wanna do this for my whole life.

我明白这个道理，所以

I knew that, so

好的。所以你当时就站在那儿，手上扎满木刺冻僵了。

Okay. So you stand there frozen with splinters in your hand.

就在某个时刻，我突然顿悟：下次必须做出改变。但三秒后我就意识到这想法有多荒谬对吧？不过那确实是我人生的转折点。虽然已经21岁，我还是去找了本地高中的校长问：能让我复学吗？

And at some point, I have a revelation about my life that next time I'm gonna do it differently. And then how ludicrous that is hits me about three seconds later. Right? And I think that was really the moment for me where I realized that I've gotta do something different. And so even though I was 21, I went and I talked to the principal of my local high school, and I was like, can you let me back in?

他说不行，你年纪太大了。而且我们也没有名额了——这是他拒绝的主要原因。但我告诉他，从现在到那时总会有人退学的，这样你们就有空位了。

And he's, no, you're too old. And we don't have room. It was his main reason. And I said, between now and then, somebody's gonna drop out. So you'll have room.

假设你们有了名额，我能回来吗？他很宽容地允许我复学，于是我补修了需要的那三四门课。

So let's assume you have room. Can I come back? And he was gracious and let me come back, and so I did the three or four classes that I needed.

是啊。你知道吗，就这点来说，这种逐渐退出的过程很特别——你突然意识到自己不必随大流。这种觉醒很危险，因为要融入社会就不得不做某些事，对吧？

Yeah. You know, just if you can linger on that, the slow dropping out, that's a weird thing that you can do with your brain. You realize to yourself that you don't have to do the thing that everybody else is doing. And that's a dangerous realization because, like, you kinda have to to be part of society to do certain things. Right.

一旦你意识到不必跟随大众，你的人生要么会变得精彩绝伦，要么会异常艰难。

And if you realize, like, you don't have to do what everybody else is doing, you can either have an incredible life or a really difficult life.

问题在于，这个过程里你只是在做小决定——今天不去上课而已。对，你只做了这个决定。但次数多了，实际上你已做了重大抉择。

Well, problem with that process is you're making a much smaller decision. I'm just not gonna go to class today. Yeah. And that's all you're deciding. But you do that enough times, you're making a much bigger decision.

嗯，这才是问题所在。

Mhmm. And that's the problem.

所以想过非主流生活的话，最好明确做出重大决定。然后你才能心安理得地退出。别让自己...最终命运会替你决定。好吧。

So it's better to make if you wanna live life in a nonstandard way, it's better to make the big decision explicitly. And then you can stop going. Yeah. Don't allow yourself to make the the It'll be made for you eventually. Okay.

不过你后来重返校园，大学期间非常出色，而之前你并不是个好学生。

Well, you got back and you eventually went to college and were very successful as a student, and you weren't that good of a student before.

确实。高中时我是个差生。甚至大学第一学期我仍不认真，几何补考勉强得了90分——那是为补修十二年级没通过的几何课。这吓到我了，我意识到：靠着1%的运气或教授放水，我差点就此终结大学生涯。幸好这些补习课成绩不会出现在正式成绩单上。

No. I was a terrible student in high school. And even my first semester of college, I still wasn't taking it quite serious because I got Mercy passed in Geometry 90, which is like the makeup class for the Geometry twelfth grade class that I didn't have. And that scared me because I realized by 1% or the grace of the professor who let me through, I just about ended my entire university career here. So fortunately, those marks don't count on any transcript because they're remedial classes.

于是下学期我有了全新开始，真正为自己而学，这才改变了一切。

And so I got kind of a fresh start the next semester and did it for real, and I did it for me. And that made all the difference.

你能谈谈作为学生如何取得成功的一些建议吗？

What can you speak to, maybe by way of advice on how to be successful as a student?

理想情况下，学校里总会有你喜欢的某些方面。无论是艺术、计算机科学、还是工艺课，什么都好。所以去选那些课程，然后咬牙坚持完成困难的部分，因为这比以后再做要容易得多。当然，这话从50岁的人嘴里说出来容易，对15岁的孩子来说就难多了。

Well, ideally, there's some aspect of school that you do enjoy. Whether it's arts, whether it's computer science, whether it's shop class, whatever. So go for those classes and just put up with and do the hard stuff because it's way easier than having to do it later. And that's easy to say when you're 50, it's harder to say when you're 15,

但是，是啊。

but Yeah.

这很有道理。

It makes a lot of sense.

好的。你加入微软的故事是怎样的？我们怎么从7-11便利店跳到微软的？

Alright. What's the story of you joining Microsoft? How do we get to there? From seven eleven to Microsoft? Yeah.

这是个

It's a

巨大的跨越。当时我重返校园，大概是大三那年。暑期我在一家电话公司打工，负责将他们的UBNet网络转换为TCP/IP现代网络架构。这工作主要是更换网卡，但还要解决为什么config.sys文件突然不让Lotus运行了——因为可用内存比之前少了10KB。那真是个计算机行业的黑暗时代，但我还是坚持做了。

big jump. So I had gone back to school, and I think it was my third year of university. I was working for a phone company for the summer as a summer job, and I'm doing conversions of their UBNet to TCPIP and modern networking. Which really a must, swapping cards, but then figuring out why the config dot sys doesn't allow Lotus to run anymore because it's got 10 k less than it used to. And it's just a horrible time to be working in computers, but I was doing it.

有天午餐时间，我拿着本叫《微软：比尔·盖茨与微软的崛起》（记得副标题是《硬盘》？）的书在美食广场阅读。这本书客观记录了微软的发家史、运营模式和企业文化。我完全被迷住了，因为这听起来正是我梦寐以求的工作环境。

And at lunch, I'm sitting in the food court with the old and the board, and I'm reading a book that I had bought called Microsoft or Bill Gates and the Making of Microsoft. Hard drive, I think is the title. And it's a great book. It's just sort of a matter of fact history of how Microsoft came to be, what it's like, how it operates, what the people are like there. And I'm reading this book, and I become really entranced by it and fascinated because it sounds like exactly the place that I want to be.

但当时我在萨斯喀彻温省，能怎么办呢？后来我翻出自己大学期间开发的Hypercache软件注册卡——这是个Amiga电脑的文件系统缓存程序（因为Amiga原系统没有这功能）。我一张张查看那些手写邮寄地址的4x6英寸卡片，想找有没有微软邮箱的用户。

But I'm in Saskatchewan, so what am I going to do about it? And what I wound up doing was I had put myself through school with a program called Hypercache, which is a file system cache for the Amiga. Because the Amiga didn't have any out of the box. And it had done reasonably well. And so I went through my registration cards, because in those days, had a four by six card that people would fill out with their name and their address, and if they had an email, their email, and they send it in, they get notifications of updates and so on when it's shareware.

最后找到三四个微软员工，我就直接发邮件说'我是萨斯喀彻温大学的操作系统专业学生，正在寻找机会'。有位叫Alistair Banks的先生回复说可以引荐，后来通过电话面试，我暑假就去了MS DOS部门工作——这多亏了Ben Slifka的破格录用。

And I went through the whole stack looking for anybody with a Microsoft email address. And I found maybe three or four people, and I just cold emailed them and said, hey, I'm a operating system student in Saskatchewan looking for an opportunity. I don't remember exactly what I said. But one guy, Alistair Alistair Banks, he wrote back and he said, know somebody that I can put you in contact with. And he put me in contact with a guy named Ben Slifka, did a phone interview, who eventually went to pirate me to work in MS DOS for the summer.

我就是这样到那里的。

So that's how I got there.

你通过谈论超级现金自学成才。你开发了一款软件

You put yourself to school by talking about hyper cash. You build a piece of software

这是硬盘的减肥程序。

It's the weight loss program for hard drives.

那对足够多的人来说足够有用，以至于他们会以某种方式给你钱？

That was sufficiently useful to a large number of people that would somehow give you money?

是的。它赚了不少钱。我是说，我卖出了几千份。每份20美元或40美元。

Yeah. It made decent money. I mean, I sold a couple thousand copies. Yeah. $20 a copy or $40 a copy.

那程序是用什么语言写的？

And what program what language was it written in?

C语言。C语言。所以有一些汇编代码。真正执行数据进出缓存工作的紧凑代码是68,000汇编。其他都是C语言。

C. C. So there were some assemblers. The actual really tight code to do the real work of transferring data to and from the cache was 68,000 assembly. Everything else was C.

好的。这是类似文件系统IO的东西吗？

Okay. This is like file system IO?

设备块IO。所以任何从驱动器服务的块都会先经过我的缓存，这是一个n路关联缓存。它会尝试匹配驱动器的几何结构，并根据你试图一次读取整个磁道的情况进行预取，诸如此类。

Device block IO. So any block that gets serviced from the drive would go through my cache first, and it was an n way associative cache. And so it would try to match the geometry of the drive and do prefetch based on you're trying to read a whole track at one time, that kind of thing.

那时候尝试把你的软件推广出去是什么感觉？比如，你是怎么找到客户的？

What what was it like trying to get your software out there at that time? Like, where how were you able to find customers?

是的，这很有趣。我记得最初是在Usenet和一些Amiga论坛上发布试用版，让大家免费试用30天。后来几家零售商开始进货。有次我和现在的妻子坐在她车里——她当时有部手机，因为她父亲特别担心她的安全。

Yeah. It's interesting. I think I started on Usenet and some of the Amiga forums posted, here's my trial version, try it out for thirty days, see what you like. And eventually got picked up by a few retailers. And I remember I was with my now wife in her car, she had a cell phone because her dad was very concerned about her safety.

那时是八十年代末，车顶装着天线，后备箱里放着巨大的机箱。突然有家软件零售商来电说要花20美元单价采购50份，对我来说就是一千美元，在1989年可是笔大钱。后来不少公司都开始批量采购。

And so this is late eighties, and she's got the antenna on the roof, and the big box in the trunk, the whole deal. But we got a call from one of the software retailers that wanted to buy 50 copies at $20, which to me is a thousand bucks, which in 1989 or whatever year it is, was a big deal. And so eventually, a number of companies just bought inventory.

让我们回到那个年代。比尔·盖茨和微软的故事非常精彩。你认为当时微软为何能主导软件和个人计算机领域，并在之后数十年保持领先？

Let's go to that time. It's such an interesting time with Bill Gates and Microsoft. Why do you think Microsoft was dominating the software and the personal computing space at that time, and and really for many many many years after?

那是我见过最顶尖的聪明人聚集地。我在学术界和工业界都待过，普通电脑公司里真正懂行的人，他们更聪明的朋友往往就在微软。刚加入时自以为很厉害，结果发现周围全是高手，都不敢随便开口怕露怯。嗯。

At the time, it was the single most potent assemblage of smart people that I've ever been a part of. And I've been in academia, and I've been in industry to a certain extent. And you know that when you're working at a regular computer company, the one guy who actually knows what he's doing, his smarter friend, he probably works at Microsoft. So when you get there, you're the big cheese from your small town, you think you know a lot, and all of a sudden, you're just in an environment where like, uh-oh, I'm just not gonna speak because I wanna look stupid. Mhmm.

明白了。比尔·盖茨本人有哪些特质促成了微软的成功？

Okay. What are what about Bill Gates himself? What are some qualities of Bill Gates that you think contribute to the success of Microsoft?

他对自己'每个家庭、每张办公桌都有电脑'的愿景有着近乎偏执的追求。这个聪明绝顶的家伙不仅自己极度坚定，还招募了同等甚至更聪明的人才，打造了一台几乎不可阻挡的智力机器来实现目标。

I think he was relentless in the pursuit of his one dream, which was his old slogan of a computer in every home and a computer in every desk. It was his special interest. And he was a smart guy, super determined, and he hired people that were as smart or smarter than him to help him execute it. And he built an almost unstoppable machine of intellect to go forth and make,

比如说非常简单的产品。MS DOS严格来说并不复杂，但完美契合了当时市场需求。没错，MS DOS改变了游戏规则——而你加入的正是这个团队。

let's say, very simple products. MS DOS is not a complicated product by any stretch, but it's exactly what the market needed at that time. Yeah. I mean, MS DOS changed the game. And that's actually the team you joined, the MS DOS team.

我记得你是在Windows 95发布前加入的。聊聊MS DOS的故事吧，它的成功应该是微软崛起的关键转折点。

And I think you joined before Windows 95 Yeah. Was released. So tell me about the story of MS DOS. It's success of MS DOS was probably pivotal to the success of Microsoft.

是的。在DOS之前微软主要是语言公司，为多种计算机开发BASIC，还有Fortran和Pascal编译器。但让MS DOS成为每台PC标配的协议，使他们确立了几十年都受益的行业标准。

Yeah. Before DOS, they were largely a language company. So they had made basic for a lot of computers. And they had a Fortran compiler and a Pascal compiler, that kind of thing. But their deal to have MS DOS included with every version or every instance of the PC effectively set them as a standard that they were able leverage for decades going forward.

某种程度上他们很幸运，但另一方面这个决策确实高明。虽然没向IBM收取高额授权费，但确立标准带来的长期优势无可估量。

And to a certain extent, they lucked into that. And on on on other hand, they were smart to have done it. So because I they didn't charge IBM a lot of money for it, but making it a standard really played out to their advantage over time.

那时候MS DOS还没有图形界面。你能简单说说MS DOS到底是什么吗？

So at that time, MS DOS, no graphical interface. Can you just speak to what the heck MS DOS is?

它本质上是个命令启动器。你输入命令名称后，系统会查找当前目录或特定文件夹路径，若存在就加载到内存执行。这就是MS DOS 90%的功能。虽然它有环境变量、一些复杂功能和内置的小型脚本语言，但本质上只是个操作系统外壳，让你能使用电脑资源如硬盘或CPU，且不支持多任务处理。

It's largely a command launcher. So you type in a name of a command, it looks up to see if that's in the current directory or on a special path of folders, and it loads it into memory and executes it if it's there. And that's 90% of what MS DOS does. Now it has environment variables and some complexity and a small scripting language built in, but it is basically just an operating system shell that allows you to use the resources of the computer like the hard drive or the CPU. And it doesn't allow you to multitask.

没有图形界面。不过微软在DOS 5.0里为编辑器和Quick Basic添加了基于文本的图形界面，DOS 4.0还有个类似图形文件管理器的DOS Shell。他们做过这些尝试，但主要还是命令行模式。

There's no graphical interface. Now Microsoft did add a text based graphical interface for things like an editor and quick basic in DOS five, I believe. And it was a DOS shell, which was sort of a graphical file manager in MS DOS four. So they experimented with it, but it's largely a command prompt.

它能与外部设备通信吗？比如驱动之类的？MS DOS作为操作系统有多大的扩展性？

Did does it have ability to communicate with external devices, so drivers and all that kind of stuff? Like how expansive of an operating system was MS DOS?

它受限于最初的x86指令集，只能寻址640K内存。后来通过高端内存和扩展内存等补丁方案突破限制，但要避免占用基础内存需要很多复杂操作。

Well, it was limited by the original x 86 instruction set, which limited it to six forty k. Then there were various band aids on top of that to do high mem, and then extended memory beyond that. And a lot of hoops have to be jumped through to make anything work without consuming base RAM.

你在MS DOS上编程是什么体验？除了640KB内存限制，还有什么有趣的细节？

Yeah. I mean, you so you programmed on MS DOS. What what's it like? What are some interesting details there? Like you said, there's the memory constraints of six forty kilobytes.

640KB是永远的上限。作为系统开发者更要谨慎，因为你每多用10KB内存，全球每台电脑就少10KB可用。这是种重大责任。

Yeah. Six forty k is the maximum that's ever gonna be available. So it's not what's available to you as an operating system developer because whatever you use is what the user won't get. So if you use 10 k needlessly, you're gonna every machine in the world now has 10 k less. So that's kind of a big responsibility.

比尔·盖茨真说过那句...

Is that a true quote from Bill Gates where he said

'640KB对任何人都够用了'？不，不是他说的。

Nobody will ever need more than six forty k. Yeah. No. It's not him. Okay.

这话被归到他头上，但并非事实。

It's been attributed to him, but not real.

好的。那么我想问，作为实习生加入MS DOS及之后时期，你参与过哪些有趣的项目？

Okay. So I mean, what are some interesting aspects that we that you were able to do as an intern and when you joined at MS DOS and beyond?

我最初的工作是改进SmartDrive磁盘缓存程序，因为我对磁盘缓存很熟悉。嗯。当时CD-ROM刚兴起，微软书架是少数能支持的应用之一。我为其添加了CD-ROM缓存功能——要知道，巧妙设计的话，缓存能让CD读取速度提升数十倍。

One of the first things I did was to take SmartDrive, the disk cache, because I am familiar with disk caches Mhmm. And to add CD ROM caching to it, because I was new. CD ROMs were just just coming out. Microsoft Bookshelf is one of the few products you could run for it. And as you can imagine, caching a CD speeds it up by dozens of times if you're smart about it.

这个优化带来了显著的性能提升，是个很棒的项目。更重要的任务是将SmartDrive和后来的DoubleSpace压缩引擎迁移到高端内存区。嗯。在不深入技术细节的前提下，x86架构有个A20地址线——我可能记反了，正确率五五开吧。

So it it was a big performance win and a nice thing to work on. A bigger part of that was moving a bunch of smart drive and eventually the double spaced compression engine up into what's known as high memory. Mhmm. And without rat holeing on the technical aspect of it, on the x a six, there's something I believe called the a 20 line. And I probably have this backwards, or I got a fifty fifty shot at it.

当A20线激活时，内存指针会在1MB处回绕。嗯。否则指针会继续向上寻址。通过组合段寄存器和偏移寄存器，可以访问超过1MB的内存空间，从而额外获得64KB内存。

But if you've got the a 20 line asserted, then your memory pointers wrap at the one megabyte mark. Mhmm. And if not, they don't. So you continue going up in memory. So you can rewrite memory above by combining your segment and offset registers to a number bigger than one megabyte, and you get an extra 64 k.

把代码放在那里，再从低内存跳转过去，就能多榨出64KB内存。我们为几个产品实现了这个方案。当时我完全不懂高端内存——毕竟之前是Amiga程序员，去微软前从没写过x86代码。

And you put your code in there, and then you just put stubs to jump to it from low memory, and so you can get another 64 k out of the machine that way. And we did that for a couple of the products, and that's I had no idea what high mem was because I was an Amiga programmer, and I'd never written any x 86 code before I got there. So

听起来你参与了个很酷的优化项目。对了，当时Windows 95也在同步开发吧？你有机会和那个团队合作吗？

So that was like a cool optimization that you got to be a part of. Yeah. So what about Windows? There was a parallel development of Windows 95, right, at that time. Did you get did you get a chance to interact with those folks?

其实我参与过三四个月的Win95开发，在COM/OLE团队负责演示缓存——比如当Word文档插入Excel表格时，不需要每次都加载Excel来渲染，我们用增强图元文件做缓存。这个功能随Win95发布了，但入职半年后我转到了Shell团队，之后就一直做NT系统。

I actually worked on Windows 95 for about three or four months. I was on the comm OLE team doing the presentation cache, which is when you insert a say a word or an Excel spreadsheet or chart into a Word document, you don't want Excel to have to be loaded to render it every time, so there's a presentation cache of enhanced meta files. And I was working on that. So that shipped in Windows 95, but I moved to the Shell team about six months after getting to Microsoft, and so I worked on NT from there forward.

明白了。95和NT有什么区别？

Okay. And what's 95? What's NT?

Win95是16位系统Windows 3.1的进化版——3.1是首个流行的Windows版本。95增加了32位支持、VXD驱动等新技术，还有全新界面。当时具有革命性，人们甚至彻夜排队购买。

Windows 95 is an evolution of the original 16 bit Windows three one, which was the very first popular version of Windows. And it adds 32 bit support, and then VXD drivers, and a bunch of new technology, and an entirely new user interface. And it's something that at the time was revolutionary. People lined up at night to wait in line to buy the thing.

能带我们回到那个年代吗？为什么95相比3.1是巨大飞跃？毕竟苹果早有图形界面，3.1也有图形界面，95的突破性体现在哪里？

Can you just take us back to that time and describe why '95 was such a big leap from 03/01? So Apple already had a graphical interface. Windows 03/01 had a graphical interface. Why was Windows '95 such a gigantic leap?

我不想把它做得像开始菜单那样基础，但我认为这是其中很重要的一部分。记得我第一次看到它时，确实如此。我无法具体说出它哪里与众不同又令人惊叹，但我意识到我想参与其中，这就是我开始编写一个外壳扩展的原因，后来这个扩展在某个阶段变成了压缩文件夹功能。嗯。我只是被这个新外壳深深吸引，这最终让我加入了那个团队。

I don't wanna make it as basic as the start menu, but I think it's a big part of it. I know when I first saw it Yeah. I couldn't quantify what about it was different and awesome, but I realized that I wanted to be a part of it, and that's why I started writing a shell extension, which became zip folders at some point. But Mhmm. I was just fascinated by the new shell, and that's why I wound up working on

正是这个团队将那个外壳带到了NT系统，也就是今天的Windows。你会说这是有史以来最伟大的操作系统吗？什么是有史以来最具影响力的操作系统？

the team that brought that shell over to the NT in what's Windows today. Would you say that's the greatest operating system ever? What's the most impactful operating system ever?

Windows 95在我心中排第二。我认为OS/360会是第一名。

Windows 95 would be number two for me. I think OS three sixty is gonna be number one.

好吧，有意思。

Okay. Interesting.

想象一下，你可以在1962年用一台机器编写COBOL程序，然后跳进时光机，来到波基普西市，启动一台IBM z17大型机，在今天运行这个程序。而且他们已经这样运行了这么多年。这些都是商业领域的应用，我们作为消费者很少接触。但我觉得它对商业领域的影响力，可能就像Windows 95对家庭用户的影响力一样大。然后Linux在我这里大概排第三。

Could you take a machine and write a COBOL program for it in 1962, jump in your time machine, go to Poughkeepsie, and boot up an IBM z 17 mainframe and run it today. And they've been doing it for however many years that is. And it's all on the business side, so we as consumers don't have much access to it. But I think it was probably as influential in the commercial side as Windows 95 was in the home side. And then probably Linux would be number three for me.

我把Linux看得比Unix更重要，虽然这样说不太准确，因为没有Unix就没有Linux。但Unix、BSD等系统的影响主要在学术领域。它们是由程序员为程序员开发的。

I put Linux as bigger than Unix, which doesn't work because you can't have one without the other. But the impact of Unix, BSD, and so forth, is largely in the academic space. It's by programmers, for programmers.

所以，是的，Linux创造了——我是说，它最大规模地体现了开源精神。对吧？它几乎创造了一个社区。它创造了一种编程精神，这种精神一直延续至今。确实如此。

So, yeah, Linux created I mean, it was the embodiment of the open source spirit at its largest scale. Alright? So it almost created a community. And it it it created a spirit of programming that propagates to this day. That's true.

确实如此。规模很重要。

That's true. Like, scale matters.

是的。现在它在服务器领域的普及程度——我不确定是否达到了System/360的水平，但几乎无处不在。

Yeah. And its penetration on the server side of things now is don't I if it's equivalent to what System three sixty achieved, but it's almost ubiquitous.

所以，是的。这个世界——我是说，这是宇宙中一个安静的秘密——它运行在Linux上。好了。那么跟我聊聊那时候的工作日吧。那时候的工作日是什么样的？

So Yeah. The world I mean, this is the quiet secret of the universe, is it runs on Linux. Okay. So tell tell me about the days, your workdays. What what were they like back then?

回到MS DOS和Windows 95的时代。带我了解一个高效的工作日。

Back back in the MS DOS, Windows ninety five days. Take me through a productive day.

嗯，你的一天从下载通讯录开始，当时微软有约一万到一万五千名员工，我们都使用MS Mail。我们刚从名为Miss Piggy的PDP 11主机迁移过来，那台机器运行的是Whizmail，现在我们改用MSmail。但MSmail有个固定通讯录，每位用户每天早上都必须下载。当一万人同时下载一万人的通讯录时，情况就会变得相当混乱。我记得那时我们用的是10兆比特的网络。

Well, your day starts coming in, you gotta download the address book, which is Microsoft has between ten and fifteen thousand employees at this point, and we're all on MS mail. We're just getting off of the PDP 11 called Miss Piggy, which ran Whizmail, and we're running MSmail. But MSmail has a fixed address book that every user must download every morning. And when there's 10,000 people downloading 10,000 people, it gets pretty messy. And I think we're on 10 megabit networking at the time.

所以你的第一个小时都在下载通讯录，这总是令人沮丧。但你会利用这段时间查看夜间崩溃报告，这些崩溃来自我们称为'压力测试'（NNT）的流程。所有闲置的机器整夜都在运行测试程序试图让自己崩溃。如果成功崩溃，它们会通过串行线缆连接到另一台机器的调试器，你可以远程调试那台崩溃的机器。等你到办公室时，故障已经过初步分类。

So your first hour is downloading the address book, which was always frustrating. But you'd use that time to look at the crashes that would have happened overnight from a process we called stress, which is NNT. All the machines that are unused run tests all night long and they try to crash themselves. And if they manage to crash themselves, they will drop into a debugger with a serial cable to another machine, and you can connect to that other machine and remotely debug the crashed machine. So you come in and they will have triaged bugs.

比如发现开始菜单有崩溃，就会把这个bug分配给Dave。所以你到岗后的第一件事就是连接调试，因为得把那台机器还给它的主人并解锁。这就是你每天的第一个小时——基本就是在处理夜间压力测试产生的bug分类。之后可能就要回归编码了，不幸的是80%时间都在修bug，至少在我的职业生涯里是这样。

You know, there was a crash in the start menu, so we'll assign that to Dave. And so you come in and that's your first thing is to connect, because you gotta get that machine back to the guy that owns it and unlock the machine. So that's your first hour of your day. It's basically triage for bugs that have come up from stress overnight. And then at that point, it's probably back to coding, which unfortunately, 80% of the time is fixing bugs, especially in my career.

我的工作主要是移植代码和修复缺陷。很少编写新代码，当然也有例外。我会私下写很多新代码来释放压力。从日常重复性工作——总是修复别人代码的bug中解脱出来，这是非常宝贵的学习经历。

It was porting code and fixing bugs. I wasn't writing a lot of new code. And there were exceptions. I wrote a lot of new code on the side to get it out of my system Mhmm. From a day day to day grind of always fixing bugs in other people's code, which is amazing learning experience.

所以你在微软做了很多移植工作？是把Windows 95代码移植到NT系统上吗？

So you did a lot of the at Microsoft, you did a lot of the porting of what is it? Windows 95 code to NT?

没错。我们把整个Windows 95用户界面移植到NT系统，其中一项重要工作就是将其转为Unicode编码。所有8位字符都要改成16位，指针处理变得相当混乱——你可以想象这种代码转换的复杂度。

Yeah. We took the entire Windows 95 user interface, and we ported it to NT, which me meant making it Unicode for one thing. So everything that was eight bits is now 16 bits, so pointers it's it's quite a mess when you switch the code over, as you can imagine.

能详细说说移植工作具体涉及哪些内容吗？

Can you give us insights in what is involved in porting?

这就像闯进别人家里翻箱倒柜，看到他们不想让你发现的东西。你会找到挂在墙上的精美画作，也会在床头柜里发现些令人不安的物件。我曾见过一段200多字符宽的代码，里面夹杂着各种脏话。虽然在我离职前这些都被清理干净了，但那些代码确实算不上世界级的专业水准。

It's like breaking into somebody's house and going through all their stuff and seeing the stuff in their drawers that they didn't want you to see. Yeah. You find all the good stuff, the pretty pictures hanging on the wall, and you find some disturbing stuff in the nightstand. I saw a code that was like 200 some characters wide with, you know, profanity and swears in it. And it eventually got all cleaned up over the years by the time I left, but it was not always the most professional code in the world.

确实。因为你必须检查每一行代码。

Right. Because every single piece of code you have to go through.

逐行来看。这样你就能一览无余。是的。

Line by line. So you see it all. Yeah.

没错。我是说，这就是程序员的故事。你以为自己写了一段代码，以为永远不会有人看到，但有时候，往往这段代码会被后来很多人看到，包括五年后的你自己。你自己回头看自己的代码。好吧。

Yeah. I mean, that's the that's the story of programmers. You think you write a piece of code, and you think you'll never you'll never be seen by anybody, and sometimes, oftentimes, that code is gonna be seen by a very large number of people that come after you, including you five years later. You yourself looking at your own code. Okay.

那么跟我讲讲Windows NT吧。那也是个巨大的飞跃。

So tell me about Windows NT. That was a giant leap too.

确实如此。它基本上是从零开始设计的。他们从数字设备公司挖来了戴夫·卡特勒，他曾为他们开发过VMS和RSX-11等操作系统。我记得是在DECwest的Prism和Micah项目被取消后，他带着整个团队转投了微软。

It was. It was basically a clean sheet design. So they went and they got Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment, who had done operating systems for them, VMS, and RSX 11 he had done. And so he came over after I believe it was Prism and Micah were some projects at Deck West that got canceled. And so you had a whole team of guys where their project is canceled, and basically, they took a whole bunch of them and came to Microsoft.

具体交易细节我不清楚，但整个团队都过来了。戴夫·卡特勒、马克·卢科夫斯基等DEC的精英都来了。他们虽然从零开始，但也参考了OS/2作为起点。不过OS/2是用汇编语言写的，而NT要用C语言编写。至于他们借鉴了多少，我其实并不确定。

And I don't know the specific of the deal, but they all showed up. So you had Dave Cutler and Mark Lukowski and all these really smart guys from Deck. And they did basically a clean sheet, but they also had OS two as a starting point. But OS two is, of course, written in assembly language, and NT is gonna be written in c. So to what extent they were able to leverage any of that, I don't actually know.

但至少他们有了个系统作为基础。

But at least they had a system to start with.

你说戴夫·卡特勒是Windows背后的灵魂人物？能详细说说吗？

You said that Dave Kautner is the man, the mind behind Windows. Can you can you explain?

戴夫·卡特勒是内核架构师。就像Linux世界的林纳斯，Windows世界有戴夫·C。戴夫·C。明白吧。

So Dave Cutler is the architect of the colonel. So he is Linus in the Linux world. It's Dave C in the Windows world. Dave C. Okay.

当然也有其他人做出重大贡献，但我觉得他始终是核心推动力。他现在应该有85岁了，仍坚持每天写代码。作为微软院士，据我所知至今仍去公司上班。

And it's not that there weren't other people who contributed, of course, huge pieces to it. But I think he's the driving force behind it, and always largely has been. And he's still I think he's 85 now. He still codes every day. He's a Microsoft fellow.

就我所知，他至今仍坚持上班。所以

He as far as I know, still goes into work. So

你能谈谈那家伙的天才之处吗？比如，与他共事、与Dave Culler互动后，你觉得他的思维有什么有趣的地方？

Can you speak to the genius of that guy? Like, what's what's interesting about his mind, having having worked with him, having interacted with Dave Culler?

嗯，这家伙聪明绝顶。但他也像个农夫，会一直盯着你确保事情完成且不出错，绝不允许任何垃圾代码混进他的操作系统。嗯，他对此零容忍。

Well, the dude's wicked smart. But he's also like a farmer. He's like the guy that will follow you around and make sure that stuff gets done and gets done right, to make sure that you're not checking any crap into his operating system. Mhmm. And he won't tolerate it.

在这方面他是个真正的严师，但我认为这很值得，因为让微软开发者接受Dave Cutler那种数字设备公司式的领导风格，是个巨大的范式转变。

And he's a real taskmaster in that regard, but I think it really paid off because it was a very big paradigm shift for Microsoft developers to be subjected to the Dave Cutler digital equipment style of leadership.

从那段经历中，你对大规模协作的软件团队成功之道有何领悟？当时微软有很多杰出工程师，如你所说，Dave Culler他们必须从头创建全新系统，其中许多至今仍在使用。

What did you learn from that about successful software teams where there's a large number of people collaborating? Because Microsoft had a lot of brilliant engineers back then. And like you said, Dave Culler, they had to they had to create completely new systems, many of which we still use today. What have you learned about great software engineering teams from that time?

工具决定一切，我认为这是首要因素。当然人才也至关重要。但工具集的影响巨大——如果我们当时有Git，事情会轻松无数倍。

Tools are everything, I think, for one. And people are everything. We'll just give that to the granted. But the tool set is a huge factor. If we would've had Git, it would've been immensely easier.

我们当时用diff和手工增量文件来管理代码。能创建源代码分支对当时的我来说简直是奢侈，那功能要是有就太方便了。

We were using diff and, you know, manual deltas Mhmm. To do the sporting and stuff. So being able to fork a branch of source code would be a luxury that is new to me. So at the time, it would have been really handy.

那时你去隔壁串门时，有哪些令人难忘的对话？

What were some memorable conversations from that time when you walked over next door?

有件事我不在场：一个新人在团队里负责Cairo项目（本应是下一代革命性操作系统，比95版更先进，但最终流产），他在NT开发邮件组（几千人订阅）上怒喷NT系统启动体验有多烂。

Well, what I was not present for was somebody was complaining, a new hire came into the team and was working on what I believe was called Cairo. And Cairo was gonna be the next future operating system, was gonna be beautiful and have a whole new user interface. Newer than when it was '95. And it never materialized. But while they were working on it, one of the guys who was working on Cairo was kind of flaming on the open NT dev alias, which is thousands of people, how shitty the NT boot experience was.

收到的回复是封史诗级骂战邮件——真该保存下来。我不点名是谁写的，他自己心里有数。那简直是愤怒邮件的艺术品，就像Lioness偶尔发的那些关于内核问题的暴怒邮件，情绪如出一辙。

And the response that came back was an epic flame that I wish I would have saved, and I won't name the guy who wrote it. He knows who he is. But it was a work of art of angry flame mail. Kinda like the ones you see Lioness send every now and then about colonel stuff. So it's a very similar sentiment.

当时有没有那种学术辩论？就是火药味很浓的那种

Were there like kind of intellectual debates? Like there's some some heated stuff

是的。

It was.

是和工程师们吗？

With engineers?

对，争论变得激烈起来。当一群高智商的人相互竞争时，技术优劣对某些人来说反而成了次要的，重点变成了在辩论中压倒对方。很多时候这种争论已经失去了建设性，但当时这种情况相当普遍。

Yeah. It got contentious. So you've got intellects competing, and eventually the technical merits for some people are secondary, and it's about besting the other person in that argument. And it's no longer productive at that point half the time, but there was a fair bit of that.

是啊。我在编程语言设计社区见过这类争论，比如Guido van Rossum（Python之父），这些社区的领导者会被这种争论耗得精疲力尽。因为人们几乎忘记了最初的目标，开始对细节吹毛求疵。工程师们聚在一起，甚至会为最愚蠢的语法细节争论不休。

Yeah. I've I've seen those kind of debates in, like, programming language design communities, like Guido van Rasam, the leaders of those communities that can wear them down. Because people get, you almost, like, forget the mission you're on and start being very nitpicky about the details. I mean, engineering minds get together and you just go to war over the stupidest, like, syntax subtlety. Right.

当然我不该说'愚蠢'，但对编程语言来说那确实是个微小的语法差异。我敢肯定内核组件内部也有类似的争斗。

Well, I shouldn't say stupid, but it's a small syntax subtlety for that's for programming language. I'm sure there's internal battles about specific kernel components.

没错。有个我输掉的争论至今想起来还让我耿耿于怀...

Yeah. I mean, there was one that I lost that still bugs me to this day, I think. And

因为至今...

because I still

是这样，当时我们在移植shell时正把整个系统从ANSI编码转向Unicode。每个字符从8位变成了16位。问题是我当时在用MIPS架构的机器做RISC移植，而MIPS不允许非对齐地址访问。当你把两个ID列表（本质是路径组件）拼接时——比如C盘根目录和Windows系统32文件夹——如果字符总数是奇数，地址就会不对齐。

think I was well, when we were doing the shell, we were porting everything from ANSI to Unicode. So every character that was eight bits now becomes 16 bits. Now the problem is I'm on a MIPS box because I'm porting it to risk. And you can't have unaligned addresses. But if you take two ID lists, which are basically path components, you take the one for c colon backslash, take the one for Windows, take the one for system 32, and you add them together.

我不得不花费大量精力启用异常处理，通过非对齐字节访问手动提取字符串。在MIPS机器上读取这种非对齐ID列表的字符串，工作量是正常情况的百倍到千倍。我主张虽然Windows 95开发已进入晚期且发布了首个测试版，我们仍应保证ID列表始终是偶数字节长度，或通过某种hack规避这个问题，让其他硬件上的代码能高效运行。结果这场讨论演变成了吼叫比赛和人身攻击，我输了。

But if you've got an odd number of characters, now you're at an odd address in this thing, and it takes me an immense amount of work to turn on exception handlers, to do unaligned byte access, to pull the string out and copy it manually. It's just a it's literally like a 100 to a thousand times the amount of work to read a string out of this ID list on a MIPS machine because it's unaligned. So I'm having the argument that even though it's late and the winner is 95, they've already shipped one beta, that we should now just guarantee that ID lists are always an even number of bytes. Or do some hack to just make sure this never happens, so the code that references them on other hardware can just blaze through it. And it became a shouting match and sort of a personal match, I lost that one.

直到今天我仍认为，现在Windows里运行的那段代码比它应有的速度慢了几千倍，只是没人关心——毕竟它已经够快了。

And I still think that I know today that that code running on Windows is thousands of times slower than it has to be, and it nobody cares because it's plenty fast.

不过确实。

But Yeah.

本可以快得多的。

It could be a lot faster.

是啊。所以你提到MIPS和RISC时，需要理解到多底层的程度？就是软件最底层，甚至你们开发时涉及的硬件层面。

Yeah. So yeah. I mean, you mentioned MIPS and RISC. How deeply did you have to understand the lowest level? So the lowest level of the software and even the hardware with the stuff you were building.

比如，要成功完成NT系统那些工作——还有更早的MS TOS——需要理解哪些抽象层级？

Like, what are the layers of the abstractions you had to understand to be successful with all the stuff you're doing with NT, and before that with MS TOS?

这么说吧，每天得有半天时间耗在调试上。而且大部分时候都得泡在纯汇编语言的调用堆栈里，因为根本没有源码级调试。

Well, about half your day is gonna be spent debugging. And and most of the time is gonna be spent in call stacks that are in pure assembly language, because there's no source level debugging.

嗯。

Mhmm.

不像现在用Visual Studio，触发断点就直接跳转到源代码。你能看源码，但当时看到的全是机器反汇编出来的原始代码。所以...

So it's not like we're in Visual Studio and you hit a break point, then it pops up and there's the source code. You can go look at the source code, but you're looking at the raw assembly dump from the machine at all So

即使用C语言编程，调试也是在汇编层面。

even if you're programming in C, the debugging is in assembly.

没错，百分之百。所以我们都练就了调试四种架构的本事，不过我MIPS经验多些，相关任务就常分给我。

Yeah. 100%. So you get reasonably adapted debugging all four, but I had more experience in MIPS, so MIPS stuff would come my way.

这简直是耐力考验。能聊聊那种折磨吗？特别是没有现代调试工具的汇编调试。现在的编程新人可能不明白，编程不全是创造美好的事物，对吧？

That's a real endurance event. I mean, can you speak to that? The the torture that's debugging, especially that kind of debugging without the without the tooling associated with it. I mean, that's you know, programming kids these days, programming isn't all about creating beautiful things. Right?

这也关乎修复问题。

It's also about fixing things.

是的。我觉得职业生涯中20%的时间在创造，80%在调试和修复。

Yeah. I would say that 20% of my professional life has been creating, and 80% has been debugging and fixing.

没错。

Yeah.

我的意思是，我因为擅长解决问题而获得声誉，所以这类工作总会找上我，导致我花更多时间做这些。我不是那种以创意UI天才闻名、不断涌现新想法的人。所以我专攻棘手问题。但你会变得非常擅长。我并不介意，除非遇到那种追查太久却束手无策的情况——搞不懂为什么失效，或者它曾经怎么生效的，诸如此类。

And I mean, I got a better reputation as somebody could fix stuff, and so stuff like that would flow to me, and so I would spend more time doing that. I wasn't renowned as a creative UI genius where I'm flowering all these new ideas. So I got to fix ugly stuff. But you get really good at that. So I don't mind it until it's one of those things where you've been chasing it for so long that you don't know what to do next, and you can't understand why it doesn't work, or how it ever worked, or whatever situation you happen to be in.

而且你知道，折腾一整天后，真的会让人精疲力尽。

And, you know, after a day of it, it can get pretty trying.

是啊。调试简直是酷刑。可能极其困难。我觉得这里面还有坚持到底的心理因素。

Yeah. Debugging can be real torture. It can be really really difficult. There's a psychological component, think, of perseverance.

那些耗时一天的bug通常有两种结局：要么是'哦，多了个分号'这种终于发现的简单错误，要么就是跨线程部门那些极其棘手的烂摊子。两种情况都有可能。

I think the ones that, you know, take you a day, they resolve one of two ways. Either it's like, oh, extra semicolon, and then you finally see it. Yeah. Or it's some horrible manifestation of cross threaded department nonsense that was really hard. But it can go both ways.

我遇到过个bug——其实不是我的问题——是任务管理器的bug表现：偶尔会显示CPU总使用率超过100%。这对任务管理器来说很可笑。我尝试解决很久，和内核组讨论时他们...可以说缺乏同情心。内核开发者比较特殊，他们对用户层问题没兴趣，认为肯定是我代码的问题。

I had a bug it wasn't my bug actually, but it was a manifestation of a bug in task manager, where every now and then, it would say greater than 100% total CPU usage. And this looks pretty silly for a task manager. So I had tried to resolve it for a long time, and I talked to the kernel guys about my issue, and they were unsympathetic, let's say. Because the kernel guys are a special breed, and they weren't interested in my user land problems. There's probably some issue in my code.

对吧？他们可能没错。但这次例外，我确信问题不在我。于是我在代码里到处加断言，确保累加步骤永远不会超过100，最终总和也绝不会超100。

Right? And they're probably right. But it wasn't in this case, and I was sure of it. And so I kept adding asserts all through the code to make sure that the that the preparatory steps of adding this stuff together were never more than a 100. And that the final sum was never more than a 100.

结果断言从未触发。但偶尔还是有人报这个bug。最后我把电话号码写进断言提示：'看到此消息请致电APL 425836（我号码）'。终于有次在之前提到的调试器里抓到了现场——正好有人连着调试器时复现了问题。

And finally, it never asserted. But occasionally, we would get this bug where people would still see it. And so I finally put my phone number in the assert. And I was like, if you see this message, call the APL at 425836, my phone number. And finally, we did get a catch in the actual stress debugger that I was talking about earlier where it happened to somebody with a debugger connected.

我们成功排查后发现，这实际上是一个内核记账问题，而非任务管理器的问题。在我证明这确实是内核问题后，他们就在内核中修复了它。你可能会以为我们会随后移除我的电话号码，但我们只是将其注释掉了。所以它被发布出去，现在所有泄露的NT源代码里都能看到。这就是我如何找到任务管理器代码的方法——我在谷歌上搜索我的电话号码，就能反向找到

We were able to go through, and it was actually a kernel accounting issue, and it wasn't a task manager issue, so they just fixed it in the kernel once I was able to prove that it was in fact a kernel issue. And you'd think we would then remove my phone number, but we just commented it out. So it's shipped and it's in all the damn source code leaks for NT that are out there, so And that's That's how I find task manager code, is I search for my phone number on Google, and it will reverse find

是啊。

Yeah.

NT的源代码。

Fine. The NT source code.

你能谈谈断言（assert）这件事吗？对了，我记得你在推特或某个地方说过，如果你想非常严肃地对待断言，就把家里的电话号码写进去。没错，这是真的。

Can you speak to the assert thing? By the way, I saw I think you tweeted or you said somewhere that if you wanna take your asserts really seriously, you add your your home phone number in there. Yeah. It's true.

确实如此。虽然有点开玩笑，因为这可能不是最明智的做法，但你会发现的。

It's true. A little facetious because it's probably not the smartest thing, but you will find out.

但我的意思是，断言本身就已经是很严肃的事了，因为它会停止所有执行。这正是我非常喜欢断言的原因之一——它们会中止一切，迫使你解决问题。

But I mean, assert by itself is already a serious thing, because it stops at all execution. This is one of the reasons I really, really love asserts, because they they stop everything and force you to take care of the problem.

是的。我对断言也有点执着。我不会对那些我希望不成立的事情使用断言，我只断言那些我知道绝对不可能为真的事情。我认为这才是断言的真正意图，所以我可能是在强调显而易见的事实。

Yeah. I'm a little religious about my asserts too. I don't assert things that I hope aren't true. I assert things that I know cannot be true. And I think that's really the intent of an assertion, so I'm overstating the obvious.

但当断言触发时，这就是一个纯粹的bug，不是什么警告。

But when it does occur, it's a bug, plain and simple. It's not a warning.

有趣的是它经常能帮你定位问题。因为如果你全局搜索，就能快速找到问题根源。

It's kind of fascinating how often it can really help you figure out the problem. Because if you put a search everywhere, you can get very quickly to the source of the problem.

没错。我倾向于...这不是我建议你后期回头补充的东西，而是应该在开发过程中自然融入的实践。所以对于每个函数，如果你有前提条件——比如你知道这个指针永远不会为空，那就断言它。如果你知道这个计数永远小于两倍字节宽度，也断言它。不要犹豫，因为如果断言触发，它是在帮你。

Yeah. I tend to it's not something I wanted to suggest you go back and add later, it's something you should do organically as you build your As you're building it. So for each function, if you've got assumptions, like, I know that this pointer is never null, well, assert that. If you know this count is always less than twice the byte width, assert that. And don't be afraid, because if it asserts, it's doing you a favor.

我觉得有些人会害怕，你知道，就像你驶出十字路口时，总觉得可能有车从左边过来却没看。对。或者也许我不想那样做，但情况类似。人们不敢坚持己见是因为害怕被解雇。

I think some people are afraid, know, it's like when you turn out of an intersection and you think maybe there's somebody coming and you don't look left. Yeah. Or maybe I don't wanna do that, but it's like that. People don't assert because they're afraid they're gonna fire.

你想什么时候了解？你提到了任务管理器。显然我们必须谈谈这个——你创造的传奇程序，Windows任务管理器。告诉我你开发它的每个细节。Windows任务管理器是什么？

When do you wanna know? You mentioned task manager. Obviously, we have to talk about this, the legendary program that you created, the Windows task manager. Tell me every detail of how you built it. What is Windows task manager?

Windows任务管理器是一个可以查看系统中哪些应用程序正在占用计算机资源、使用硬件、CPU和内存的工具，它能识别哪些程序可能占用过多资源、卡死或崩溃，并允许你终止这些进程。所以它是个诊断与修复工具。

So Windows Task Manager is a way to go in and find out which apps on your system are using the computer, using the hardware, using the CPU, using the memory, and which ones might be using too much or locked up or going crazy, and it gives you the ability to terminate and kill those ones. So it's an inspection and a fixing tool.

没错。它列出了所有进程。我是说，这真是个传奇软件。太疯狂了。人们都把它当作理所当然的存在。

Yeah. It lists all the processes. I mean, it's a legendary piece of software. It's crazy. I mean, you just take it for granted.

就像开始菜单一样。对吧？是的。简直是天才之作。

It's like the start menu. Right? Yeah. It's like genius.

我很幸运参与开发了许多人们熟悉的项目。任务管理器是我为自己开发的副业项目之一，后来被公司采纳。我在家里开始编写它，完成了基础功能的搭建。当时我通过注册表中的HKEY性能数据获取统计信息，因为在家办公无法调用内部API。嗯。

Well, I had the great fortune of working on a lot of things that people are familiar with. And task manager is one of those side projects that I started as something that I wanted for myself and eventually came in house. So I started writing it at home, and I got kind of the basics up and running. And I was using, I think it's HKEY current perform HKEY performance in the registry to get the stats because I didn't have access to the internal APIs because I was working from home, and I don't call those if I'm working from home. Mhmm.

当我把项目带回公司后，就能调用类似anti_query_system_information或anti_query_process_information这样的接口快速获取真实数据，这让它成为响应极快的应用程序。人们依赖它是因为我尽可能确保其可靠性。我不追求花哨功能，只专注实现基础功能集，但要求它必须极其稳定。

And when I brought it in house, then I was able to call things like anti query system information or anti query process information and get the real answers very quickly, which enabled it to become a very fast and responsive app. So people have come to rely on it because I wrote it to be as reliable as possible. I wasn't worried about the features. It was a basic set of functionality that I wanted in there. And I got everything I wanted, but I wanted it to be really robust.

而且体积要小。最初版本只有87KB左右。

And so that and small. And the original was like 87 k.

明白了。你能谈谈开发这种不会卡死的软件需要哪些关键点吗？

Okay. Can you speak to what it takes to build a piece of software like that that doesn't freeze?

你不能做太多假设。比如通过shell调用程序时，那可能是需要90秒超时的TCP/IP网络路径。所以任何可能耗时的API调用，都应该放在独立线程中处理。这使得应用程序稍显复杂，因为所有操作都需要多线程处理。

You don't assume much. Right? If you're going to call the shell to run an app, well, that could be a network path that's on a TCP IP share that takes ninety seconds to time out. So anytime you do any kind of a p l API call like that that could take time, you're gonna wind up doing it on a separate thread. And so the app becomes a little bit more complex because everything is multi threaded.

好的。那么你当时用的是哪种编程语言？C语言。所以这是为Windows NT开发的？

Okay. So what programming language were you working in? C. So this was for Windows NT?

是的。最初是在NT 4.0版本发布的。

Yes. Okay. So this shipped initially in NT four.

明白了。这个程序有哪些有趣的细节？因为你需要让它尽可能简单，同时又要尽可能健壮。比如，你不得不实现哪些有趣的优化？

Okay. So what are some interesting details about this program? Because you have to get it as simple as possible, but also as robust as possible. What are some interesting optimizations, for example, you had to implement?

有几项现在看起来有点硬核的做法，我自己都惊讶当时能做到。比如，我完全不想链接C运行时库，所以确保绝不调用任何运行时函数，也没有链接它们。这帮我省下了C运行时库那大约96K的空间。

There's a couple of things I that are a little hardcore now. I'm surprised I did. Like, I didn't wanna link to the c runtimes at all. So I made sure never to call a runtime call, and I didn't link to them. And that saved me whatever the c runtime is, 96 k or something.

要知道，只要调用任何一个C函数，程序体积几乎就会翻倍。所以我小心翼翼地避免这种情况，但实际上我写的是C++——本质上更像是带对象的C语言。为了让程序运行，我不得不手动通过调度表调用所有对象构造函数，因为没有运行时库帮你处理这些。相当于在用没有配套运行时的编译器工作，虽然不想深究技术细节，但这确实需要大量额外功夫。不过成功后，程序会变得极其精简高效。

So you know, it almost doubled the size of the app if you just touched any c call. So I was careful not to do that, but then I was actually writing in c plus plus which is c with objects more than anything. But in order to get it to work, I had to go through and call all the object instructors manually from the dispatch table and stuff because you don't have the run times to do it for you. So you're working with a compiler that doesn't have its run time and I don't want to rat hole on the technical issues, but it's a lot of extra work to get it to work. But when you do, it's incredibly small and tight.

这就是程序体积的关键。那么在追踪每个进程及其CPU占用率方面，有哪些特别的设计？

That's about the size Yeah. Of the program. What are some interesting aspects of tracking down, like, every every process and how much CPU usage in that One

最酷的是——虽然不能说发明了汉明码，但我确实在不知道汉明码存在的情况下，独立想出了类似方案。任务管理器里每个行列都有标记位表示是否脏数据，然后我可以用类似汉明码校验X/Y轴的方式定位变更的行列，只重绘必要部分。任务管理器与列表视图控件协同工作，能精细到只重绘帧间变化的单个单元格。因此它渲染极快，缩放无比流畅——而实现流畅缩放正是我个人对这个程序的最大追求。

of coolest things that I saw is, I don't wanna say I invented Hamming code, but I kind of invented Hamming code without knowing Hamming code existed. So every column and every row in task manager has a bit on whether it's become dirty or not, and then I can look basically the same way Hamming code looks in your x and y columns to find out which rows have changed, go through and find out which ones actually need to be repainted. So task manager is super efficient, and it works in concert with the list view control, which provides that functionality to go through and repaint as little as an individual cell that changes from frame to frame. So it could paint very fast, it could resize very smoothly. And resizing was probably my biggest personal goal with that app.

嗯。所以无论窗口缩放到多小都能正常使用。即便有32个CPU（当时根本不可能），它仍会绘制——我记得是8个图表然后折行显示——这套机制至今仍适用，我对此相当自豪。

Mhmm. So you can size it to any size and it still works. And even if you have 32 CPUs, which wasn't possible in the day, it will draw, I think only eight graphs and then it wraps, but it still works today. So I'm kinda proud of that.

确实了不起。你见证了任务管理器的演变历程。某种程度上它其实变化不大，虽然界面会随Windows版本变得更美观，但核心功能始终如一。

It is incredible. You've gotten the chance to sort of observe the evolution of task manager. In some ways, it really hasn't changed much. Maybe there's some prettier aspects to it that fit into the whatever version of Windows it's in, but it's really basically the same thing.

基础功能确实没变。主要是报表内容丰富了，比如增加了GPU和温度监控这些实用功能——这在当年可是无法实现的。

The functionality is very same. The reporting is more because they've added GPU and thermals and things like that, which is really nice to have. And we didn't have that ability in the day, so

我是说，你能说什么呢？你知道有没有进行过重构，还是基本上还是原来的代码？

I mean, what can you say? Do you know about like it was there any refactoring done or is it basically the same code?

据我所知，原始代码大部分都还在。所以上面叠加了绘图代码、暗黑模式代码等等，还有XML、架构代码，这让它从87k变成了4兆。但这就是我们生活的世界，没办法。

As far as I know, the original code is still mostly all there. So there are layers of drawing code and dark mode code and whatever else, XML, schema code that goes on top of that that makes it four megabytes instead of 87 k. But that's the world we live in, so.

是啊。这就是那种你一旦创造出来就永远存在的软件，就像开始菜单一样。我敢说如果你删了它，人们肯定会疯掉的。

Yeah. It's one of those pieces of software you create and you just stay once it's there, it's really like a start menu. And then I'm sure if you remove it, people will just lose their mind.

没错。它可能会被锁定一段时间，这也许是件好事。

Yeah. It might be locked in for a while, and that one might be good.

是啊。我以为Clippy也会这样，但总有一天它会卷土重来的。好吧，你当时还创造了哪些传奇软件？你至少参与了《太空军校生弹珠台》的移植工作吧？

Yeah. I thought that would be true for Clippy, but Clippy will make it back one day. Alright. What are what are some other pieces of software you created at the time that are legendary? So you were part of Space Cadet Pinball, at least porting.

对。他们走进我办公室问：嘿，你在干嘛？我就告诉他们我在做什么。然后他们说：那你接下来三个月想做什么？我说：完全没想法。

Yeah. So they came into my office and said, hey, what are doing? And I said, told them what I'm do. And they said, well, how do you wanna spend your next three months? I said, have no idea.

他们就说：想移植弹珠台吗？我之前见过《太空军校生弹珠台》作为Win 95平台的独立游戏。它有几种不同的桌面，是个很酷的游戏，所以我有点兴奋。他们其实是想要NT系统有个视觉亮点，展示NT能处理高速图形，至少是响应式图形。于是我就试了试，可惜大部分代码都是汇编写的。

And they said, do you wanna port pinball? And I had I'd seen Space Cadet Pinball as a game standalone for the Win 95 platform. It had a couple different tables, it was a cool game, so I was kind of excited. What they wanted was some visual splash for NT to show that NT can do for the in high speed graphics, and or at least responsive graphics. And so I took a shot, And unfortunately, lot the code was in assembly.

我当时在用MIPS架构，所以得用C语言重写代码才能移植到所有平台。这个游戏的核心是个巨大的状态引擎，我记得像是个有50个分支的巨型switch语句。

And I was on the MIPS, so I had to rewrite the code in C, so I could import it to all the different platforms. And at the heart of the game is a huge state engine. And it's like a giant switch statement with, if I remember, like 50 entries in it.

是啊。而且

Yeah. And

里面还内置了彩蛋。解析这些状态就像让神经网络处理各种输入。我就把它放在一边当黑盒处理。我的代码运行在它上面，负责绘图、音效等等。但原始游戏其实仍在运行。

it's got an easter egg built in. And decoding the state, it's like running a neural network through this thing as you hit it with different states. And I just put it aside and treated it as a black box. And so my code runs on top of that and does the drawing and the sound and everything else. But the original game is still running.

最近有人问我为什么会有细微差别？物理效果与Windows '95版本略有不同，本应是相同的代码，因为我非常努力地保持原样。但问题出在我有一个bug，我会尽可能多地绘制每秒帧数，在现代电脑上弹珠台游戏可能达到每秒5000帧，因为它是个相当基础的游戏。所以你的所有物理效果都是每秒插值5000次，而不是旧版本中的每秒30次左右。可以说你得到了更好的——至少是不同的物理效果。

And somebody recently asked me why is it slightly different? The physics are slightly different from the Windows '95 version, it should be the same code because I'm trying very hard to preserve that. But what it is is I had a bug where I will draw as many frames per second as I can, which on a modern computer could be 5,000 frames a second for pinball because it's a pretty basic game. And so all your physics are interpolated 5,000 times per second instead of 30 times a second, or whatever you would have got in the old ones. You're getting arguably better, at least different physics.

不过后来他们修复了这个问题，所以

But they fixed that since, so

为什么这个游戏这么棒？

Why is that game so awesome?

我认为是设计很出色。当然这不是我的功劳，完全归功于Cinematronics团队。原版游戏设计非常棒，和我实际拥有的实体弹珠台游戏《Black Knight 2000》非常相似。

Think it's a great design. I mean, I take no credit for that. That's all totally the guys' cinematronics. But the original game is a great design. It's very similar to Black Knight 2,000, which I own as an actual physical pinball machine.

两者的布局其实很相似。不确定是否有借鉴关系，总之是个好游戏。

And the layout is actually very similar. I don't know if it was inspired by it or not. So it's a good game.

是啊。有时候我会想，比如俄罗斯方块，某些图形相当原始的游戏却能吸引大量玩家。或许正是众多玩家的热情反哺了游戏的魅力。当很多人一起兴奋讨论时，这种情绪就会植入你的脑海。这确实是伟大的游戏之一。

Yeah. Sometimes I think about, like, Tetris, about certain games with pretty primitive graphics that captivate the the excitement of a large number of people. And and maybe it's the excitement of a large number of people that contributes to the awesomeness of the game. So when when many people together get excited and talk about it, that sort of gets implanted into your head. But that's one of the great games.

就连纸牌和扫雷也是。整整一代人都在扫雷上'征战'过，对吧？

I mean, even even like Solitaire and Minesweeper. I mean, there's just a generation of people that have gone to war in Minesweeper. Right?

其实这些被纳入操作系统时并非作为游戏，而是作为教你使用鼠标的教育工具。

Well, those things were included in the OS not as games, but as educational tools to get you to use a mouse.

哦，有意思。

Oh, interesting.

所以纸牌游戏是为了演示拖放操作。

So solitaire is there to show you how to do drag and drop.

是啊。

Yeah.

扫雷游戏大概是右键操作。我记得你是用右键插旗子什么的。

And Minesweeper is probably right click. Think you put a right a flag or something.

我不...呃...

I don't Yeah.

虽然我不算扫雷玩家，但每个游戏都在教你些东西。扫雷高手啊。

Not a Minesweeper guy, but so each one of them teaches you something. Minesweeper guy.

真有意思。哇哦，我之前都不知道，太有趣了。

That's funny. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know that. That's interesting.

确实如此。但我说不清在这些游戏上花了多少时间，像数百万人都把无数小时耗在这些游戏里。

And that's true. But I don't know how many hours I've spent on these games, and like millions of people have spent millions of hours in these games.

我以前在孩子学校志愿教计算机课，就是给三年级小朋友那种。其实更像是教登录操作而非计算机科学。不过那些孩子的父亲都在微软工作，所以你做啥他们都不觉得稀奇。直到有孩子发现我参与过《三维弹球》开发，他们突然就'哇！你做过弹球游戏？'因为那个年代的孩子都知道这个游戏。

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 the kids, of course, all their dads work at Microsoft, so nobody's impressed by anything you do. But someone of the kids found out I worked on Pinball, then they were like, woah, you worked on Pinball? Because they all knew that in those days.

现在那些孩子可能都过了玩这个的年纪，已经不知道了，但曾经有那么一阵子...

Now, the kids are probably aged out, they don't know it anymore, but for a brief period.

原来Windows激活系统背后有你参与。

You're behind the Windows activation.

你说得好像这是什么坏事似的。

You say it like it's a bad thing.

一切皆视角问题。那就讲讲这个故事吧。什么是Windows激活？你是怎么参与其中的？

Everything's a matter of perspective. So tell the story of that. What's Windows activation? What how'd you get involved?

他们在XP开发后期找到我。我不确定测试版是否已经发布。应该还没发布，但他们原本打算沿用Office的激活代码，将其适配到Windows系统，为Windows添加激活功能。可负责此事的人多次拖延，导致无法按时完成。而我当时以快速解决问题著称，所以他们来问我：你能在XP发布前搞定这个吗？

So they came to me late in the XP ship process. I I don't know if the beta had gone out. 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 gonna happen, and so I had kind of reputation for being able to fix things quickly. So they came to me and said, can you get this done in time for XP?

我说不知道，但会尽力。在DRM团队和研究产品密钥算法的同事协助下，我们赶在XP发布前完成了。虽然不清楚这对营收的实际影响，但强制使用许可证密钥后，收益应该相当可观。

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 it actual impact is for revenue, but I imagine it's substantial when you start enforcing license keys.

我在想具体数字。不知道。因为这确实也挺烦人的。

I wonder what it is. I don't know. Because it's also annoying.

确实烦，尤其是电话激活的时候。这就像我们不得不背负的沉重包袱——必须向清算所的后端系统提交数据来验证密钥，要上报所有硬件参数：内存大小、硬盘空间、与硬件密钥绑定的各种信息，还有产品密钥。这些都被编码成字母数字组合，让人通过电话逐字念出来。

It is. Especially if you have to phone activate. And that was just the case that we had to carry with us as an albatross around our neck, where you've got to pass data up to the clearinghouse, the back end systems that are gonna approve your key. You've got to tell all your hardware parameters, like how much memory and hard drive space, and the various things the hardware key is bound to, as well as the product key. And you've got encoded in letters and numbers that somebody's willing to read in over a phone.

如果你觉得电话激活很痛苦，想象一下电话那头的工作人员？每天八小时听人念产品密钥，这工作简直能把人逼疯。

And if you think doing product activation is painful over the phone, could you imagine being the person that worked on the other end of that line? I mean, that's just gotta be a mind numbing job to listen to product keys for eight hours a day.

是啊。Windows的一个挑战（也是让我沮丧的地方，虽然从设计角度能理解其难度）就是用户群体太庞杂。但令人失望的是，Windows越来越偏离高级用户需求——这也是Linux始终更受欢迎的原因。无论是激活还是其他配置，Windows都制造了太多挫败感。

Yeah. One of the challenges with Windows, and it's been a frustration point for me, but I I understand from a design perspective, it's very difficult, is so many different kinds of people use Windows. But it's been frustrating how over time, Windows is more and more leaned into the direction of, like, the not not the power user, I should say, which is why sort of Linux has always been really wonderful. But from an activation perspective or from any kind of configuration, it's been it's been a it's been a source of a lot of frustration. Yeah.

我最近最火的节目就是讲为什么不能移动Windows任务栏。没想到这个话题能引发强烈愤慨——当人们发现不能把任务栏放左侧或顶部时，感觉生存权受到了冒犯。某种程度上我能理解这种情绪。

One of my more popular episodes of late has been why you can't move the Windows taskbar. Yeah. I had no idea, but the outrage is palpable amongst people that you put on the left or top and you can't anymore, and it is an affront to their existence. And I understand it to a certain extent.

这正是我讨厌Windows 11的主要原因之一。任务栏位置这种基础设置都不能自定义。就不能让我们自由配置吗？毕竟总有一小撮高级用户会因此更爱这个系统。

Well, it's one of the main reasons I really just dislike. There's a lot of aspects about Windows 11 I dislike. One of which is like you can't customize things as much about the position of the taskbar, just basic customization. Can we just configure stuff? Because there's going to be a small contingent of power users that are just gonna enjoy the hell out of this operating system.

开放这个选项对你们毫无成本，何不给他们这份自由？

If you just give them that option, it costs you nothing. Just give them that freedom.

嗯，这确实需要成本。对吧？因为将开始菜单放在左侧、顶部或右侧的自由度，确实增加了渲染开始菜单、布局标签页等功能的代码复杂度。现在它成了更大的漏洞温床，也需要更多代码维护。所以你很可能需要更多开发人员，或额外分配开发者的部分时间。

Well, it does cost. Right? Because the freedom to put the start menu on the left or the top or the right really increases the complexity of the code that renders the start menu and lays out the tabs and does all the things. And now it's a much larger surface for bugs, and it's a much larger piece of code to maintain. So you probably need more developers or another developer or some portion of a developer's time.

问题在于，满足一小部分用户的特殊需求到什么程度仍然值得？虽然这些决策不由我做出，但我能理解双方的立场。

So the question becomes, at what point is it still worth it to satisfy the niche needs of a small set of users? And I I just met those decisions weren't mine to make, but I could see it from both sides.

我认为就像电影人插入只有少数人能察觉的微妙细节那样，这终将获得回报。长期积累的口碑会产生强大的涟漪效应——包括吸引优秀软件工程师。就像营造出一种注重每个细节、关怀高级用户和开发者的氛围。微软收购GitHub后越来越注重这点，但在Windows界面方面...得了吧。

I think, just like the people who make movies and insert very nuanced details that only a small number of people will realize are there, that's gonna really pay off. There's a kind of reputation that builds over time that has a very powerful ripple effect that I think it has it it has so many benefits, including for hiring great software engineers. It's like you create this aura of a place that puts love into every detail, that puts that really takes care of the power users, that takes care of the developers. I think Microsoft is more and more moved in that direction with GitHub and acquiring GitHub and just taking care of the developers. But on the Windows interface side come on.

看看VS Code能自定义所有东西。为什么开始菜单就不能？任务栏也是，Windows界面的每个方面都该如此。

Some customization. With, you know, with Versus Code, you can customize everything. Why why can't we customize the start menu? Alright. Anyway, in the taskbar, and really every aspect of the Windows interface.

我不...或许你是对的。也许确实增加了代码复杂度。但我怀疑事实并非如此。

I don't I don't I maybe you're right. Maybe it increases the complexity of the code. I suspect that's just not the case.

我打赌是。重写开始菜单时这肯定是个排期决策。因为新版和旧任务栏不同，有人被要求'必须交付这些功能'——如果砍掉左右顶部布局和多行标签页等酷炫功能，就能提前四个月交付。

I bet it was. I bet it was a scheduling decision when they rewrote the start menu. I think they rewrote it because it's different than the old taskbar. Mhmm. And somebody was tasked with, you've got to deliver this set of functionality, and if I cut out putting it on the left and the top and the right and two rows of tabs and all the other cool features, I can deliver it four months sooner.

不是说这决定正确，但猜测类似动机促成了这点。现在他们的发布周期完全不同——过去只有长期负责某个组件的人才能打磨出精品。如果UI每个版本都改，永远达不到那种精致度。

And I'm not saying that's the right decision, but I'm guessing that might be the kind of thing that motivates it. And they're on such a different release schedule now. It used to be you won't see much craftsmanship unless somebody owns a component for a long time and it settles to a point that then you can work on and polish it. Right? But if it's always churning and the UI is changing every release, it's never gonna get that level of polish.

不过我觉得现在的UI还不错，只是...

Although, I think the UI is pretty nice, but

是不错，但我觉得这不是排期问题，是工艺问题。就像任务管理器那样——如果有人像你这样长期投入热情，短时间内就能独自创造出惊艳之作。

I It it it is nice, but I think there I think it's I just don't think it's a scheduling thing. Think it's a craftsmanship thing. Just like you with the with the task manager. If there's a guy or a girl in there who take ownership of it, who have, like, passion like, for them, it's a thing that they take pride in over a period of time. They can, like, by themselves in a short amount of time create something truly wonderful.

对。大型软件团队有经理和会议排期时，你的论点成立。但如果允许创造者像谷歌那样培育个人项目，让优秀个体自由发挥就不同了。

Right. And like, I I I think if you have large software engineering teams with managers and scheduling of meetings and all this kind of stuff, yeah, okay. Then then your argument applies. But if there if you allow the flourishing of individuals that create cool shit, and, like, their own sort of the side project, which Google is very good at.

试过了对吧？谷歌。是的。

Tried that. Right? Google. Yeah.

是啊。比如，玩得开心点。做些疯狂的事情，然后我们会整合它。我们会尝试融入整个生态系统。我也不确定。

Yeah. Like, have fun with it. Like, do some crazy stuff, and then we'll integrate it. We'll we'll try to integrate into the whole ecosystem. I don't know.

没错。因为对我来说，作为一个独立开发者，能创造出像任务栏开始菜单定制这样的东西是巨大的快乐——你知道数百万人会使用这个任务栏。然后你知道可能有成千上万的开发者会用它来定制任务栏最细微的细节。你能想象通过一个JSON配置让人们自定义任务栏功能时，能带给人们多少快乐吗？

Yeah. Because, like, to me, there's it's such a great joy from an individual developer to create something like customization of the start menu of the taskbar because you know that millions of people are going to use it, the the taskbar. And then you know that thousands, tens of thousands of developers might be using to customize even little subtle aspects of the taskbar. You know how much joy you create you give to people to customize to have some kind of JSON thing where you customize something about the taskbar?

好吧。但你怎么回应史蒂夫·乔布斯的观点——提供定制选项意味着我们无法为你找到最佳方案？或者可能根本没有标准答案，四个选项都同样正确。我完全没概念。不过

Okay. But how do you respond to the Steve Jobs aspect of giving you customization implies that we couldn't figure out the right answer for you? Or maybe there is no right answer, and all four answers are equally right. I have no idea. But

对。我一直认为苹果的存在是好事。那种设计理念很棒，但我觉得Windows创造了对比。Windows的定位本就是能在各类设备上运行的操作系统，它应该更开放，随着Linux子系统等发展，微软确实越来越往这个方向走了。

Right. I think I've always I I'm glad Apple exists. It's a beautiful thing. That ideal of design is wonderful, but I always thought that the the Windows creates the contrast. Like, the point of Windows is to be the operating system that works on all kinds of devices that this is much is supposed to be much more open, and they've moved towards that direction more and more with Windows subsystems for Linux.

整个开发者友好型生态就该如此。界面设计也应该遵循这种精神。不过这种开放性确实可能引发安全隐患，不仅是代码复杂度问题——Windows始终处在攻击火力之下。

It's just this whole developer friendly ecosystem. It it the interface should be in the spirit of that, I think. Right. But but I do think that there could also be security vulnerabilities that created with that. It's not just the complexity of the code, because Windows is just under attack.

是啊，保持系统安全非常困难。话说回来，你还开发过Windows的zip文件支持功能，创造了可视化压缩工具，就像我之前提到的最终演变成zip文件夹的功能。讲讲这个故事吧。

Yeah. It's very difficult to keep it secure. Anyway, taking that that tangent, you also developed the zip file support for Windows, creating visual zip, like I mentioned zip folders that eventually evolved into zip folders. Tell the story of that.

那又是我在家写的软件。当时我和妻子外出，记得是个周日下午。我们开车兜风——那是1993年，还住在公寓里——想看看房市行情。

So that was a piece of software that I I wrote at home again. And what happened was I was out with my wife, and I think it was a Sunday afternoon. We're driving around. This is 1993, and we're living in our apartment. And we're just seeing what the housing market is like out there.

有栋漂亮的三居室，车道上停着93款火炬红克尔维特敞篷车，挂牌价30万美元。以我当时的经济状况连首付都凑不出。我把宣传单上的房子照片剪下来贴在显示器上，这就是我熬夜编程的动力——回家后我专注两件事：

And there's a guy, he's got this beautiful three bedroom house and a Corvette convertible, 93 red, torch red parked in the driveway and house is for sale and it's like 300 k I think. And there's no chance I'm coming up with 300 k at that point, or even the down payment on that. So I took the flyer and I cut the picture of the house out, and I taped it to my monitor. And that was my incentive to just write something at night. Because when I came home, was doing two things.

一是释放工作中修bug无法满足的创作欲，二是想赚外快。在加入Shell团队前，我根据当时MSJ杂志（MSDN前身）的示例代码写了Shell扩展程序——那个教人打开文件夹的模板。有了基础框架后，添加zip支持就是顺理成章的迭代了。1995年（可能是2995年笔误）我把它作为共享软件发布，卖了几百还是几千份。

I was one expressing a creativity that I couldn't get out of work when I was just fixing bugs. And I was trying to make some extra money. And so I wrote Shell extension before I actually went to the Shell team, started it, and that's what led to my interest in going to the Shell team based on MSDN sample, MSJ at the time, MSJ sample that I saw on how to like bring up a folder. Well, once I had the very basic bring up a folder template, adding zip file support to it was just incremental all the way. And I released it as a shareware product, I think it was 1995 or 2995, and I sold whatever, couple hundreds or thousands of copies.

有一天，我正准备上班时接到一个电话，是一位女士打来的，她问：‘你是戴夫·普卢默吗？’我说是的。她又问：‘你是开发Visual Zip的那个人吗？’我回答没错。然后她说：‘我是微软的贝琪，我们希望你能过来谈谈收购的事。’

And one day, I'm getting ready for work and I get a call, and it's a lady, and she says, are you Dave Plummer? I said, yeah. She said, are you the guy that wrote Visual Zip? I said, yeah. And she said, well, this is Betsy from Microsoft, and we'd like you to come by and come in and talk about an acquisition of it.

我说好的，问她在哪栋楼。她却反问：‘什么意思？’我说我可以直接过去。她解释：‘不，你需要先联系差旅部门，还要和法律团队沟通，这些都需要安排。’但我完全没搞懂状况——

I said, okay, what building are you in? And she's like, what do you mean? I said, well, I'll come by. And she said, well, no, you gotta talk to travel, and you gotta talk to legal, and this all has to be set up. But I'm like, I don't get it.

我们明明在同一个公司工作，为什么不能直接过去？我不确定当时是否原话这么说。但经过几分钟沟通后，我们才意识到她根本不知道我是微软员工。

We both work at the same place, why can't I just stop by? I don't know if I said that literally. Yeah. But it was a few minutes of back and forth, where we both realized that she didn't know I worked there. Yeah.

他们只是随机联系软件作者，结果发现就是我本人。后来他们提出了收购报价，这让我陷入两难：如果拒绝，要么继续卖自己的版本但得辞职，要么停售软件保留工作。

That's They just cold called the author, and then found out that it was me. Yeah. And That's funny. So they made me an offer on it, and it's the kind of thing where if I don't accept the offer, now my choice is I can keep selling my own version and quit Microsoft. Or I can stop selling my own version and work for Microsoft.

两个选择都不理想。当然我可以保住工作，但我也想保留这份收入。最终我接受了他们的报价，然后用这笔钱买了辆93年的红色二手科尔维特。

Neither of those is great. I mean, I keep my job of course, but I'd like to still have this income stream. And the other option was accept their offer, which is what I did. So then I bought a used '93 red Corvette.

你得以继续在内部开发它。

You got to continue building it internally.

是的。我们删减了很多功能来简化，比如移除了加密——当时那个年代的压缩软件普遍有这个功能，但对Windows并不合适。那时候加密就像军火弹药，不能随意添加到操作系统各处。

I did. So we took a lot of features out, right, to simplify it because it had encryption, it had a number of features that were common in zip programs of the day, but probably weren't appropriate for Windows. And at the time, encryption was like ammunition. Mhmm. So you couldn't just add encryption willy nilly to various parts of the operating system.

我们还移除了分卷压缩支持等功能，主要是为了简化。你能...

So we took out some things like that. Multi volume support, I think, was taken out just to simplify it. Can you

聊聊Zip的总体情况吗？关于压缩技术的历史发展之类的？

speak to Zip in general? Just the history of Zip and, you know, compression, that whole thing?

它诞生于BBS时代，人们通过调制解调器拨号下载试用软件和共享软件。可执行文件压缩率约50%，其他文件更高。菲利普·卡兹开发了DOS命令行工具PKZIP，后来成为PC行业标配。等到Windows问世时，虽然系统没有原生支持，但zip格式已流行了十年之久。

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 BBS's online. And to compress them, executables compress about half their size, other stuff compresses much more. 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. And he has a rather tragic arc, but it became ubiquitous in the entire PC industry, and pretty much everybody was using it. So when Windows came out, there was no way to open up a zip file, but everybody had been creating them for a decade.

这确实推动了将zip支持直接集成到Windows中的需求。

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

是啊。而且这款软件至今仍伴随着我们。嗯。

Yeah. And that's another piece of software that's just kinda with us to this day. Mhmm.

它本可以大幅改进，但要知道，这是单核时代一天写成的，所以不支持多线程。就算你有96核的7995处理器，它也只用一个核心来解压文件。

And it could be vastly improved, but you know, was written in a single core day, so it doesn't do anything multi threaded. You've got a 96 core seventy nine ninety five, well, it uses one of them to unzip your file.

你在微软还参与过哪些了不起的项目？其他软件呢？

What other awesome things were you a part of at Microsoft? What other pieces of software?

我参与了Windows Media Center的初始原型开发。那是在1996年，当时我们没有任何片源。只有一张MPEG视频光盘，里面有《狂暴鲁道夫》和最早的《南方公园》圣诞特辑——

I worked on the initial prototypes of Windows Media Center. So we did that in '96, I believe. And we didn't have, at the time, any sources. So we had like a CD of MPEG video files of Raging Rudolph, and I think the original South Park video,

那个

the

以现在的职场标准来看内容都很不合适，但在获得正式片源前这就是全部素材。后来我们在屋顶装了18英寸的DSS卫星天线，因为大楼接不了有线电视。最终我们做出了类似媒体中心的系统，这是Windows的远距离观看界面，你可以用遥控器在桌面操作——现在的开始菜单在20英尺外根本看不清，所以...

Christmas one, which is all wildly inappropriate in the workplace today, but it's all the content we had until we got actually we had them put a satellite dish on the roof, a DSS, whatever the 18 inches dish is. Because we couldn't get cable to the building. And so we built up this thing that would eventually look a lot like media center, and it was distance viewing UI for Windows, so you could sit with a remote control on a desktop and have, you know, the current start menu is not great at 20 feet away, so

说说那个臭名昭著的蓝屏死机故事吧。

Tell me the story of the infamous blue screen of death.

当Windows别无选择时就会出现蓝屏——比如内核遇到非法操作：设备驱动程序试图写入不属于它的内存空间，或试图重复释放同一块内存。发生这种绝对不该出现的情况时，内核只能关机来保护你的工作数据——准确说是防止进一步损坏。

What it is, is when Windows has no other option, when the kernel gets into a state where something illegal has happened. So let's say a device driver is trying to write to a piece of memory he doesn't own. Or is trying to free a memory piece of memory twice. Something that just cannot happen, and the kernel has no other option, it will shut the machine down to save your work. And well, not save, but prevent further damage.

然后显示蓝屏并输出堆栈信息（取决于你的设置），现在Windows有时只显示一个悲伤表情。

And it puts up a blue screen, and it prints out the stack information, depending on how your settings are. Sometimes it's just a sad face in the current Windows.

是啊。我在想Windows的第一个版本或蓝屏是怎么诞生的。

Yeah. I wonder what the first version of Windows or the blue screen came to be.

Windows 3确实有蓝屏功能。嗯。但它与Windows NT的蓝屏完全无关。我和编写Windows NT蓝屏的人聊过，他叫John Vert。他选择白字蓝底的原因，我一直以为是实验室里能看到50台PC同时运行压力测试时——

So Windows three had a blue screen Mhmm. But it's completely unrelated to the blue screen of Windows NT. And I talked to the guy that wrote the blue screen of Windows NT. His name's John Vert. And the reason he picked white on blue, I had thought I'd always heard of because in the labs, could walk through a lab where we have 50 PCs all running stressed.

‘哦那台蓝屏了，崩溃了’。但实际没那么复杂，只是他构建时用的MIPS固件就是蓝底白字，他用的Visual Slick Edit编辑器也是同样配色。所以你能在统一配色下完成编码、启动、崩溃和重启整个流程。

Oh, that one's got a blue screen, it's crashed. It wasn't that simple, it was just the MIPS firmware that he was building it on was blue on white. And visual slick edit that he was using as editor was also the same color scheme. And so, you could code, boot, crash, and reboot, all in the same color scheme.

为什么你觉得电脑问题大多能通过重启解决？

Why do you think so many problems with computers can be solved by turning it off and turning it on back again.

我认为电脑长期运行会出现两大问题：一是内存被占用后未释放。没错。这样堆内存或交换文件中会积累垃圾，系统变慢。二是代码进入开发者未预料或未充分测试的状态。

I think there's two major things that happen with computers as you run them over time. One is memory gets used and not freed. Yeah. And so it accumulates on the heap or in the swap file or wherever, and things get sluggish. And the other is code gets into a state that the developers didn't anticipate or didn't test very well.

嗯。可能这种状态很罕见，但一旦记事本或Word、Excel进入这种状态，系统就异常了。所以只要重启或关机再开，就能获得干净状态且没有内存泄漏。这基本上能解决...

Mhmm. And maybe that's a rare state, but now that Notepad or Word or Excel is in that state, your system is goofy. So if you just reboot the thing or shut it down or restart it, you're getting a fresh state and there's no memory leaks. So it covers a

...大部分问题。多个异常状态软件间的复杂交互会产生某种‘超级异常’，让整个系统开始表现怪异。然后莫名其妙又好了。你在微软期间见过最好和最烂的代码是什么？

lot of sins, basically. And the intricate ways that several pieces of software in a goofy state interact with each other creates sort of a meta goofy state that just kinda had just the entire system starts acting a little weird. Yeah. And then somehow fixes it. What's what's some of the best and the worst code you've seen during that time at Microsoft?

哪些优美代码和糟糕代码让你记忆犹新？

What's some beautiful code and what's some ugly code that pops to memory?

优美代码方面，有两个让我印象深刻：一是整体内核代码，深入Windows内核后...嗯...真正的NT API之类写得非常规范，这种标准在用户端很少见。用户端最酷的代码是个叫Bob Day的人写的命名管道实现，用于取代共享内存方案——

In terms of beautiful code, there's two that stand out for me. One is the kernel in general, when you get down into the Windows kernel Mhmm. In the actual NT APIs and stuff, it's very well written. And it's written to a standard that you don't see on the user side, or at least is uncommon on the user side. On the user side, probably the coolest code I remember seeing was a guy named Bob Day wrote a named pipe implementation to eliminate the use of shared memory.

Windows 95所有shell进程共享一个大内存段来存储公共数据。我们不想这么做，因为在NT系统共享内存是工业级坏主意。他用命名管道实现了替代方案，我记得代码评审时深受震撼——那种‘换我可能搞不定’的惊艳感。

So Windows 95 had a big shared segment amongst all the shell processes where it would store stuff that's common to all the shells. We didn't want to do that. Shared memory is a bad idea on NT and an industrial level. So he came up with a way to do it with named pipes, and I remember doing the code review on it, and it was very impressive to walk through the code. It was one of those things where it's like, oh, I don't think I could have done that if I was trying.