Retired Microsoft Developer Shares the Project Details that Earned Him a Little Red Corvette

Those “brainiacs” who come up with all the wonderful software to make our computers more useful aren’t always nerds.

For example, take a look at retired Windows developer Dave W. Plummer, who now shares his vast knowledge of computers on his YouTube channel.

While he may be better known for being the creator of Windows Task Manager, Dave explains in a post on X how it was he who came up with Zip folder integration within Windows before the turn of the century – in the process getting enough money from Microsoft for his brilliant idea to buy a “lightly used” Torch Red 1994 Corvette LT1.

Dave says the idea came to him around 1993 when he was working for Microsoft on COM. At home one day just for kicks, he started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. It eventually morphed into a shareware product known as VisualZIP.

Microsoft was so impressed that one day Dave received a call from a company official wanting to buy it and inviting him to come talk about it. Dave’s request for her office number “kinda freaked out” the lady. “She said, ‘No, no, we’d have to coordinate with travel and legal,'” Dave explained. “But I was confused as to why I’d need to book travel to talk to someone where I already worked! And THEN I figured it out. She didn’t know that I already worked for Microsoft, and I didn’t know that she didn’t know. So that was a bit awkward.”

In the end, Dave figured he had two options: quit his job with Microsoft and compete with the biggest software company in the world or take “their first, best, and only offer.”

“I accepted their offer, paid the taxes on it, and bought a lightly used red 1994 Corvette LT1,” Dave said. “There wasn’t much left over. So next time you open a zip file on Windows, think of my car. :)”

Microsoft debuted built-in zip support with the “Compressed Folders” feature in the Windows 98 Plus! 98 pack and took it to a wider audience in Windows Me in the year 2000.

As for why the product is so slow these days, Dave offers the inside scoop, though the explanation may be above the mental capacity of some of us. “First, being 25+ year old code, it’s single threaded. It doesn’t matter how many CPU cores you have, it only uses one. Second, because of the way the shell used to work, you couldn’t just hand it the contents of a file, you had to give it a local file path at the source. So the code first extracts the file to a temporary location, hands that location to the shell, and the shell copies the file. In other words, there’s an extra temp copy operation involved in every operation.”

Dave doesn’t think Microsoft would go to the trouble to speed it up now, as they figure anyone concerned enough about zip performance or feature set would just be using 7-Zip or WinRAR or some other more modern product, but he’s just happy that his idea wound up buying him a little red Corvette.

Source:
Dave Plummer / Twitter via tom’s Hardware

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