Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB to run on 90s comps

hermannj314•about 11 hours ago

I'd suggest just watching the YouTube video and supporting the content creator with likes and subscribes and not reading the ad-laden summary paraphrasing it.

0xy•about 8 hours ago

You don't want to be supporting that guy. He's an ex-scammer who used to operate a registry cleaner malware business.

He agreed to pay the State of Washington $400,000 for the scheme.

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

ghastmaster•about 7 hours ago

I thank you for the information! However, I want to play devil's advocate with your sentiment.

Is his current content a scam? No. Did he rehabilitate? Maybe. Should former blackhats be banned from whitehat efforts? If that's the only instance of his ethical wrongs, I think I'll give him a pass. There was a lot of that crap software at the time. I never bought into any of it. A lot of people were scammed to a certain extent. I hope he learned his lesson. His sharing of knowledge is still valuable to him and posterity. Maybe we can get him to do a video on his softwareonline.com shenanigans!

jsiepkes•about 5 hours ago

There is more. For example his Start menu story turned out to be bogus too:

https://adamdemasi.com/2024/07/24/windows-nt-4-start-menu-wa...

nubinetwork•about 11 hours ago

Let's be real, Windows 2000 ran reasonably well on only 128mb of memory... if it needed megabytes like modern apps, it wouldn't be very useful, especially when you're low on memory.

carefree-bob•about 11 hours ago

Win2K was peak windows for me. Every subsequent version has gotten worse from my POV.

bombcar•about 11 hours ago

I'd probably lean towards Windows XP with the W2k theme (at least later in its life) but it was basically the same thing.

Main difference was easier-to-install video card drivers, though you could often get them to work on W2k by editing INI files.

ahartmetz•about 11 hours ago

Yes. A no frills but full-featured NT. It was the best version of Windows.

naikrovek•about 9 hours ago

Agreed.

Even WinXP had goofy web technology tied into File Explorer (called “Windows Explorer” then, I believe). Win2K was just optimal, for me, for what I was doing at the time.

Grumbledour•about 1 hour ago

I think Win2k already had that. As far as I remember, the explorer sidebar, the white box with the colored line under the heading, already being HTML. I loved hacking on that back then to customize my windows experience.

Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB to run on 90s comps

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