MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows
- Reference: 1762950665
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/12/thirty_years_of_task_manager/
- Source link:
If the user needs a chisel, don't give them a Nerf bat
Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, says his lean original has grown roughly 50 times in size. Rather than critique today's version, Plummer took to his Dave's Garage YouTube channel to offer a [1]window into Task Manager's scrappy origins , including the thought process behind its development, and his unfortunate decision to include his home phone number in the source code.
'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it [2]READ MORE
"The birthday is stamped into the code itself: November 10, 1995," Plummer said.
Task Manager emerged from what Plummer called "a very Unixy impulse" - he wanted to see what was running on his system. Windows NT had the architecture to surface that information but no dashboard. So he built one.
"What happened next could really only have happened in that 1990s Microsoft era when the company still ran on caffeine and bravado."
Plummer brought it in. The NT team liked it. Dave Cutler himself, then the leader of NT development at Microsoft, tried it, liked it, and gave the team the green light to ship it.
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Not everyone was thrilled. Cutler had Plummer put Task Manager at the top of the Start Menu, horrifying the Windows 95 team, whose vision of a clean and simple interface had been despoiled by abject nerdery. "Some wanted it pulled," said Plummer. However, Task Manager also had its champions, and the code eventually found its way into the source tree.
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As his first complete application, Plummer approached Task Manager carefully. "When I'm new to something, I do it carefully and try to follow all the rules. It's because I don't know enough to take any shortcuts yet."
The result was a compact and reliable application. He noted the NT 4 Task Manager is only 85 kilobytes and remains functional today.
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Committed to accuracy, Plummer discovered a bug where CPU totals occasionally exceeded 100 percent. The kernel team was "unsympathetic" to his suspicion that NT's process accounting was at fault.
[7]Microsoft Task Manager now tasking PCs with running multiple copies of itself
[8]In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out
[9]Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS
[10]The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think
So he instrumented an assertion to trip if the sum crossed 100 percent and added his home phone number so testers could call him if it happened. Then a beta build shipped with the message before he could remove it.
The kernel bug was real and eventually fixed. Plummer commented out the message, but the number - which he still has today - remains in the source code. "Please don't call."
Early Task Manager versions could bring Windows to its knees if users gave processes real-time priority or trigger Blue Screens of Death. But Plummer didn't see preventing user choices as his responsibility.
"I believe the operating system should be the arbiter of what's allowed, and that my job was not to second guess it."
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Thirty years on, Task Manager endures. As for what was the most important line of code? It isn't a line, according to Plummer. It's a habit.
"It's the habit of eating your own dog food and accountability that says if a number is wrong or a window flickers, I take it personally until the fix ships. He added: "It's a product of a time and a culture that allowed ownership over time to translate into craftsmanship.
"It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work. Ship a build, make a flight, save a document, and my job is to just fix things and get out of the way.
"And it's the habit of resilience. If the tool itself gets stuck, revive it. If the system is starving, work in reduced mode," Plummer said. "If the user needs a chisel, don't give them a Nerf bat." ®
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[1] https://youtu.be/yQykvrAR_po
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/does_windows_really_suck_that/
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/microsoft_has_managed_to_break/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/hiring_firing_microsoft_plummer/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/dave_plummers_worst_windows_bug/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/23/the_unix_epochalypse_might_be/
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[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Download Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 update. Extract THAT taskmgr.exe. And you will have the final "good" version back, with full support for 64 bit and a higher number of CPU cores than older versions. "Good" in quotes because: I miss the "command line" tab - and that's it, the only actual thing I miss.
... I am not installing the Linux subsystem for windows just to be able to do 'top'. That's stupidity.
Either that, or I have been trolled.
"It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work."
And there, so neatly encapsulated in that one sentence, is the gulf of difference between not only MS of old and today, but of most software peddlers. Back in the good old days, software generally just let users do what they needed to do provided it was within the fundamental capabilities of the software itself, whereas these days, no matter how capable the software now is, I find myself now increasingly battling with it to let me do what I *know* it can do if only it'd expose that specific sub-mode of the UI to let me do it, or if only it'd stop trying to second-guess what I was trying to do and constantly get in the way by thinking it knows better than me.
This article, as well as the one from yesterday, really resonated with me. As a child of the 70s/80s, riding the wave of the home computing boom in the UK starting with the early 8-bit systems (ZX81, Spectrum, Beeb) then through the 16/32-bit era (Amiga, ST, Archimedes, Mac Classic) and into those early years of PCs moving out of the corporate environment into the home (Win3.1 onwards, plus a bit of OS/2 Warp), I've spent decades gaining experience of using a wide variety of systems all of which had at their heart a fundamental respect for the person sat in front of them, and a clear design ethos based around facilitating their ability to use the systems in whichever ways they so desired, no matter what the original intent of the design team might have been. Hence the myriad of games, demos and other bits of software which constantly pushed those systems to do things that impressed even the designers.
Today, sitting in front of a W10/11 PC with infinitely more raw potential than anything I've ever had access to before, yet which feels utterly stifling to use, I find myself increasingly longing for a return to those genuinely good old days when computing was still fun and exciting, and reading the words of someone who was a part of those times, is in a position to speak with some authority, and seems to have much the same opinion of the state of affairs these days, is both refreshing and depressing in equal measure, and I wonder how much more pain the average PC user will be willing to endure before there's a collective scream of "enough is ENOUGH!" and the pushback begins.
I have a dinky little Asus machine that could barely manage Windows 10. After a few days, and having developed a complete and total hatred of Windows (my last Windows was XP), I dumped Linux Mint Cinnamon on a USB stick and booted it.
I had never used Linux before, so I kept booting off the USB stick as my main drive with the idea that if I screw it up I can just reimage it.
Well, after a month and a bit the drive failed - USB flash devices don't like being main filesystems, but my experiences with Linux up until that point meant that my mind was made up. I installed Linux over top of Windows. It's a Linux only machine and while it has its quirks (the sound randomly dies on me), the difference between that and Windows is astounding. It's pretty fast on low end hardware, it uses a lot less disc space so I have 20% free after installing a bunch of things including the Arduino IDE. But most of all it doesn't try to get in the way. It's not perfect, the auto-hiding scrollbars are a joke, they're like eight pixels wide. Yeah, I'm whinging about scrollbars because, well, that and the audio glitchy are the things that irk me day to day, and I'd put the audio down to some lame proprietary Intel shit so not exactly Linux's fault.
But, honestly, I'm never going back to Windows. Linux does all the stuff I wanted from a machine and without being anything like as annoying about it.
So as a person who still uses RISC OS from time to time and also remembers when computers worked for you rather than for some faceless corporation...allow me to gently nudge you in the direction of Linux. There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...
re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...
Almost everything is better than the dystopia of Windows 11...
"my job is to just fix things and get out of the way".
I guess there's been a vacancy there the past 30 years. Where do I apply?
It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work
Something so woefully missing today when it's all too normal to interrupt your workflow to show you an adverts. Maybe someday soon your desktop will be just like the mobile "experience" where it's just accepted that everything will periodically halt in order that you can watch that stupid shouty Temu advert for the tenth time...
Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work
Maybe someday soon your desktop will be just like the mobile "experience"
Mine won't. Neither will yours if you choose to take control.
Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work
As someone who has to suffer W11 in a corporate environment, I don't get interrupted by adverts, but I do regularly get interrupted by the even more annoying way that Office is now designed to treat even a few femtoseconds-worth of inactivity as a sign you're no longer *really* focused on whatever you were doing in Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams etc. etc., and that it's therefore *entirely* acceptable for the Office Update system to suddenly, without any forewarning, opportunities to defer to a later point in time, or even any sort of feedback to at least let you know what it's doing, close down the app you were literally just using in order to apply whatever update it's deemed so utterly essential to the survival of the known universe, that it simply HAS to be applied without any further ado.
Honestly, given a choice between having to watch an ad, where I at least *knew* that the system was deliberately preventing me from doing anything for that period of time, or having to sit twiddling my thumbs for an entirely unknown period of time not being entirely certain that Word etc. has suddenly closed down to perform an update, or if it's done so for some other reason, and having to then just wait patiently without any knowledge as to how long that wait will be, before things start up again, allow me to gather my train of thought again and resume whatever it was I was doing before the system so rudely interrupted my work, then I'd choose ads. And as someone who utterly despises online advertising and quashes it wherever possible, that should tell you all you need to know as to how utterly and completely user-hostile I now consider Office Update to be. How anyone at MS could look at the implementation and go "yeah, that's a perfectly acceptable way for us to treat users" beggars belief, yet here we are.
It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work
The User does *not* want to "experience" your software.
The only good UX is "I never noticed it".
Task Manager was my 101% fave Windows app.