Microsoft veteran says the Task Manager was under 80 KB because "small was fast and fast mattered" — but wishes "we had carried more of that taste, not the suffering"

Earlier this year, Microsoft veteran engineer Dave W. Plummer (perhaps better known for "Dave's Garage" across modern social media) teased what Windows' Task Manager could look like today. It featured a modern dashboard featuring a pounding synthwave soundtrack.

Task Manager for Windows is Plummer's brainchild, and as you may know, it's designed to help users address common issues affecting their operating system's performance and memory usage.

Plummer recently shared how he built the original version of the app at just 80KB while still ensuring that it was "insanely fast" and efficient (via Tom's Hardware).

For context, the current Task Manager build is about 4MB. During development, the engineer prioritized making the platform crisp and responsive, especially since its role is to help recover the PC after a system failure.

Plummer wrote Windows' Task Manager at 80 KB because of the hardware limitations at the time. “Every line has a cost; every allocation can leave footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent,” indicated Plummer. “And so, when I ended up writing Task Manager, I didn’t approach it like a modern utility where you start with a framework, add nine layers of comfort, six layers of futureproofing, and then act surprised when the thing eats 800MBs and a motivational speech to display just a few numbers.”

According to Plummer:

“Task Manager came from a very different mindset. It came from a world where a page fault was something you felt, where low memory conditions had a weird smell, where if you made the wrong thing redraw too often, you could practically hear the guys in the offices moaning.”

He admits that computing has evolved, and modern PCs are more sophisticated. However, while developing the Task Manager, it was so small because "in that time and place, small was fast and fast mattered."

Perhaps more interestingly, Dave Plummer provided a bit of insight about how the Task Manager, indicating that it communicates with other instances of Task Manager. This way, it gets to investigate and communicate with the program. If it doesn't reply, then it shuts it down.

The engineer further indicated that the Task Manager only enabled and worked with part of its program if that was needed to run. However, this isn't the case right now. According to Plummer, "users pay every cost upfront all the time for every user, whether or not they benefit. Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight."

He also explained that the Task Manager differs from modern utilities both in scope and intent. Aside from the size aspect, modern utilities lack the instinct for refusal. He argues that instead of asking "Does the user benefit from this work right now?" They only focus on whether the hardware can handle it.

“And while I absolutely do not want to go back to that old hardware, I do wish we had carried more of that taste," Plummer concluded. "Not the suffering, the taste, the instinct to batch work, to cache the right things, to skip invisible work, to diff before repainting, to ask the kernel once instead of a hundred times, to load rare data rarely, to be suspicious of convenience when convenience sends a bill to the user.”

Hopefully, Dave finds some respite in Microsoft's plans for major improvements to Windows. The OS hasn't enjoyed the same kind of popularity as it used to, but things at least seem to be moving in the right direction.

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