Keep pulling the thread on Dave Plummer.
Microsoft's deal to have MS-DOS included with every IBM PC set the company up as a standard that it leveraged for decades.
Dave Plummer was part of the team that ported the entire Windows 95 user interface to Windows NT, a process which required converting the codebase from 8-bit ANSI to 16-bit Unicode.
Microsoft hired Dave Cutler and his team from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to lead the development of Windows NT, which was largely a clean-sheet operating system design.
Dave Plummer initially developed the Windows Task Manager as a personal side project at home before it was adopted internally at Microsoft.
Microsoft acquired the 'Visual Zip' software from Dave Plummer, which he had developed as a personal side project, after the company's acquisition team cold-called him without realizing he was already a Microsoft employee.
According to internal metrics Dave Plummer has seen, the Windows Task Manager is used approximately two billion times per month.
Dave Plummer developed the native zip compression support in Windows.
Dave Plummer ported the code for Space Cadet Pinball, also known as 3D Pinball, to Windows.
Dave Plummer created and sold a shareware program called HyperCache, a file system cache for the Amiga computer, to help pay for his university education.
Dave Plummer believes that during the early 1990s, Microsoft had the most potent concentration of intelligent people he has ever been a part of.
Dave Plummer ranks IBM's OS/360 as the most impactful operating system ever created, with Windows 95 as number two and Linux as number three.
A COBOL program written for an IBM mainframe in 1962 can still run on a modern IBM Z17 mainframe, demonstrating extreme backward compatibility.