The Corvette that Windows zip folders bought

https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1764459921616359478

by taubek • 2 years ago

173 120 2 years ago

saagarjha• 2 years ago

Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP.

Of course, if you did that today Microsoft would probably sue you for competing with them.

mh-• 2 years ago

Probably not.

Keep in mind I'd asked for permission and got it in writing BEFORE I started. But yes, it was generous of MSFT to allow me that flexibility right from the first date of hire...

source: https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1764646948769079705

10729287• 2 years ago

And this is how, kids, generations of managers can’t find back their word and excel files they received zipped and edited in the doomed AppData Temp folder.

TMWNN• 2 years ago

I guess it was a fundamental mistake on Plummer's part to not make said temp directory read-only, to force people to copy files out of the folder before editing it?

lozenge3• 2 years ago

I think, if you press "Open" in IE on the file download dialog, it goes to temp. Then, the default for zips is to extract to the same folder.

So, the original mistake was offering people to open downloads without saving them first. I'm pretty sure they removed that later, around the time "mark of the web" was added (a metadata on downloaded files that triggered extra/different confirmation dialogs on opening the file).

anthk3• 2 years ago

Gnome (Nautilus/Files) by default uncompress any file in the spot and you see the resulting folder at the side.

wdfx3• 2 years ago

So, the lesson here is to take something which you know to be a sub-optimal product, simultaneously sell and abandon it, and spend all the proceeds on luxury goods?

iwanttocomment• 2 years ago

Naah, dude really didn't have a choice here. His two options were to be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature... or he could sell them his app, which they would then functionally abandon, and he'd get enough money to buy a sweet 'Vette. There's an absurdity to that situation that says more about the Microsoft of the '90s than about anything this dude did.

wdfx3• 2 years ago

This is a fairer interpretation, thanks.

be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature

It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.

endgame• 2 years ago

And, given what MS did to Stacker[1], competing probably would not have gone well.

[1] https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/disk-compression-stacker-double...

lozenge3• 2 years ago

He says he got permission in writing before his employment. So not much risk there, I hope.

NeoTar• 2 years ago

What do you expect?

When I've sold something - am I expected to continue to maintain it out of the goodness of my own heart? It's not owned by me anymore. If the purchaser wants to maintain it and/or pay me to then that's up to them. It's Microsoft which abandoned it, not the individual.

Probably I can't even create a more-optimal product. Any contract worth the paper it is written on would have a clause which says 'you can't go out and recreate an identical product immediately'.

And yes, it's a luxury purchase, but it was an unexpected windfall. They had a job with Microsoft so were presumably making a decent wage that covered their regular expenses already. Why not buy something to make you happy?

wdfx3• 2 years ago

I know there's more to it; I'm just being overly cynical this Monday morning.

bawolff2• 2 years ago

Perfect is the enemy of good, especially in business. This is nothing new.

The fundamental point of capitalism is that you work, get paid, and then can spend your money on whatever you want even if its silly. If the author likes cars, so be it.

sparrowInHand• 2 years ago

The lesson is to work on topics that are used by billions and make something small and useful, that is hard to replicate and thus worth a buyout.

dist-epoch3• 2 years ago

There is nothing hard to replicate here.

Microsoft could have put 3 of their programmers to work on this for one month. But it's probably faster and more convenient to just buy it out.

kramerger• 2 years ago

I wonder how much the winzip and winrar guys made

royjacobs• 2 years ago

As soon as the first person registers WinRAR I'm sure they'll let you know!

dist-epoch3• 2 years ago

Unfair, there are dozens of us who paid!

gruturo• 2 years ago

I'm aware of at least 2 people, one being myself.

MikusR2• 2 years ago

Here, the same guy who wrote zip folders: https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1760716122591252882

anthk3• 2 years ago

RAR as a library in games/media? Tons.

victorstanciu• 2 years ago

This is the same Dave Plummer that also created the Task Manager. He also has a YouTube channel with a lot of nice tidbits like this about what it was like to work at MS back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

jmkni• 2 years ago

He also wrote a good book - https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Autistic-Millionaire-Everythi...

Dalewyn2• 2 years ago

As I recall, he was also part of the team that wrote the Windows NT Start Menu by reimplementing the Windows 95 Start Menu which was written by an entirely different team.

throwaway345353• 2 years ago

He was also fined by the Washington Attorney General for spreading malware.

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

xbar• 2 years ago

Registry Cleaner marketing was pernicious.

narag3• 2 years ago

Some interesting videos there. I like those about minipcs.

jdboyd2• 2 years ago

I thought his long interview with David Cutler was excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE

skobes• 2 years ago

Today, employment agreements usually say that the company owns anything you build, even "at home for fun", that overlaps with their business.

Was this not the case at Microsoft in the 90s?

bawolff2• 2 years ago

Maybe MS just wanted to be nice.Maybe author was in a juridsiction where it is unclear how enforcible those clauses are if it was outside work hours and not using company equipment. Maybe they thought the price was low enough that it wasn't worth the potential backlash of appearing to be underhanded.

Just because something is in the contract doesn't mean it gets enforced to the letter if neither side wants it to be.

wongarsu4• 2 years ago

Giving one of your employees an unexpected bonus sure beats fighting them in court. It's a really small sum we are talking about here, they probably planned to spend more on it if the author was someone willing to negotiate. And it's not like the guy didn't make them enough money with his contributions

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Apparently it wasn’t as settled as it is now, similar stories are found at folklore about Apple and devs developing at home.

throwuxiytayq• 2 years ago

Do they really? Where do you live? I'd never sign a paper like that.

shortrounddev23• 2 years ago

They're standard across almost all tech companies. Typically they're constrained to say that "anything you work on that's related to your job belongs to us"

NikolaNovak3• 2 years ago

Yes. Canada and USA. If you read your employment contract with Th a large corporation there'll wording on intellectual property rights while employed. Chances are also good you'll have to review a document or training on yearly basis - not specific to this one thing but on various policies (security, ip rights, corruption, harassment, competition, social presence, etc).

Many people don't know it's there, for various reasons. But it typically is - after all, that's just corporations learning from history.

quartz• 2 years ago

He clarifies that he had prior written agreement to work on shareware and this software specifically. You can do this at most established big tech still today (possibly tougher at startups).

And hey it worked out great for Microsoft— they got the software they wanted at a great price (1x used corvette * ~1.8 for taxes) with no negotiation, and they already employ the guy who wrote it so I imagine integrating it was even easier than they expected.

kube-system• 2 years ago

Even if your employment agreement doesn't say that, it might be advisable to sign an agreement with your employer that explicitly excludes any of your side projects that overlap with your employer's business. If it's linked enough to your employer's business, and you're salaried, and it could be demonstrated that it is part of your job duties, it might not be that clear as to who actually owns the code.

andai2• 2 years ago

Seems like a great loss for mankind. Hire the best people in the world, and then disincentivize them from innovating.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

This is not legal in most European jurisditions, unless it is proven that you took advantage of inside knowledge.

The trick is to never do any side gigs that are directly related to the main activities at work.

kjksf• 2 years ago

It's a great story but I can't think of it as an example of general financial illiteracy.

Corvette lt1 is $70k which was $40k in 1993.

It would be $780k today if invested in S&P 500. A nice retirement safety net.

It would be $6 million today if invested in Microsoft stock. That's fuck you money.

So kids, if you're young and have unexpected windfall, invest it at least in S&P 500 index.

But I'm not surprised most people don't do that. I didn't at that age.

willcipriano2• 2 years ago

I don't think this advice will be as valuable in a world that is dedollarizing as rapidly as this one.

pavlov• 2 years ago

Yeah, nobody wants dollars anymore, they’re doomed. If you still have any laying around, you should wire them to me and I’ll dispose of that junk for free.

sneak• 2 years ago

$6 million isn’t remotely fuck you money where “fuck you money” is defined (as originally) as the ability to say “fuck you” to anyone anywhere at any time.

Try mouthing off to a city inspector or a customs cop because you have $6M. They’ll fuck you right back like any other five or six figure pleb. Fuck you money starts somewhere in the hundreds of millions or perhaps low single digit billions.

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Fuck you money, colloquially, is the ability to say “take this job and shove it” - not the ability to raise a personal army and conquer a small city state.

arghwhat• 2 years ago

Well, saying "fuck you" to billionaire drug lords won't do you much good even then.

I think it's fair to settle for 99.99% "fuck you".

Macha• 2 years ago

Dave almost certainly has "fuck you money" from the stock he got in his employment at Microsoft. Not everyone's employers are going to explode in value like Microsoft either

lozenge3• 2 years ago

He would already have been heavily invested in MS. Dude has a 40-core desktop machine for funsies. And you should see his smart lighting rig...

blibble• 2 years ago

have you seen the guy's house?

I don't think another $6 million would mean much to him

post_break2• 2 years ago

I could die tomorrow. A sports car today is worth more than money in the bank to some people.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS2• 2 years ago

No family to think of, eh?

sakopov• 2 years ago

Eh, not everything needs to be stashed away into stock market. Should also live your life a little. Plus, I'm sure Dave did well at Microsoft.

hluska2• 2 years ago

Not only is this way beyond the topic. But you don’t know who Dave Plummer is, do you?

andai2• 2 years ago

For context, he would have made 3x more if he'd put it in Apple stock ;)

cvwright• 2 years ago

A friend’s dad worked at IBM in the 80s and 90s. They told the story of his “million dollar car”, a Nissan Z that he sold Microsoft stock to buy in the early 90s.

Not quite as impressive as this $6M Corvette, but still a fun story.

dctoedt• 2 years ago

A couple of years ago, a young family friend told me he'd had Bitcoin back when it was going for like nothing — he sold it to buy an iPhone or something like that. He was phlegmatic about the riches he'd have had if he'd hung onto the BC.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

That *could* be fixed, but I imagine the sense is that anyone who's hardcore about their zip performance or feature set will likely be using 7-Zip or WinRAR, etc.

On the contrary, power users like me use 7zip because built-in ZIP support is so slow. And the vast majority of regular users - they just silently suffer and use the slow-built in.

(And I use 7zip because it's the least bullshit compressor/extractor I know - works perfectly fine through context menus, without having to ever look at the main UI. But you know what would be even less bullshit? The compress/extract functionality in explorer.exe! If only it wasn't dog slow...)

shortrounddev23• 2 years ago

I like peazip

jeffgreco• 2 years ago

Aren't you both saying the same thing? Someone who cares about performance will use 7zip.

mauriciob• 2 years ago

No, they’re saying that they would use the built-in ZIP support if it was performant enough. Since it isn’t performant due to design limitations, they have to use 7zip.

DrammBA• 2 years ago

It's amazing how two people can make the exact same argument, yet argue as if they had opposing arguments.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

I'm saying that approximately everyone cares about performance of this, or other functions of the OS. I'm using 7zip, even though I would prefer not to, but this is me solving the problem for myself. Most users are not capable or not in a position for this kind of self-help, so they're just silently suffering through.

MikusR2• 2 years ago

7zip author also doesn't care about security. He had to be prodded with sticks for years to add basic memory safety checks to his code.

newsclues• 2 years ago

The cars bought by id software from shareware money will always be the greatest in my mind.

bluedino• 2 years ago

I like the story about how Andy Hertzfeld 'sold' RMaker to Apple for one of the first LaserWriter printers ($7,000 USD in the early 80's)

https://folklore.org/RMaker.html

eschneider3• 2 years ago

Mercifully, Apple gave certified developers half off for those printers. I remember getting a bank loan for the $3500 printer. It cost more than my car. :0

swozey• 2 years ago

I thought a "Laserwriter Printer" was going to be some gigantic CDRW burner from the 80s and wasn't too surprised about the cost for a dev to mass make CDs that they can send to customers vs 3rd partying it.

But thats a (paper) laser printer.. oof. I do remember my parents spending $300-500 on a laser printer in the 90s. I guess dot matrix was that bad.

nxobject• 2 years ago

Interesting to figure out where its cost comes from – the LaserWriter had a 68000 (no FPU) and 1.5MB of RAM – the Macintosh 512k released late '84 cost $2795, and it's surprisingly hard to find a workstation with increased memory but without secret sauce chips (e.g. the SUN bespoke MMU, whatever SGI had going on.)

dist-epoch3• 2 years ago

That's probably more money than the WinRAR people got :)

King1st• 2 years ago

This Autistic hero has a youtube.

neilv• 2 years ago

Is that a personalized license plate?

narag3• 2 years ago

No, it's the random plate that came with the vehicle. (He tells that in another tweet)

Edit: he also tells that he gets this question often.

scaglio2• 2 years ago

I'm disappointed: I can't see any comments about the awful .zip file integration in modern Windows version. Extracting the files requires a pop-up or a non-intuitive context menu.

jdboyd2• 2 years ago

It sounds like it was the best it could reasonably be expected be back in the late 90s, and if it hasn't been improved sufficiently since then is probably not at all his fault.

scaglio2• 2 years ago

Yes, absolutely, I didn't mean to blame him. But from Windows 95 to 11 something could have been improved, from MS.

1000100_1000101• 2 years ago

Last time I tried to use the built-in zip extraction was in XP, perhaps Win7. It was awful.

It was slow. Unzipping archived source with thousands of files could take an hour or more... or 15 seconds via pkunzip.

It didn't warn of corruption. Windows-unzip a corrupted file, and it will just stop at the point of corruption with no feedback, as though complete. Using pkunzip you'd get a warning about a corrupted file.

Being that slow, and not reporting errors are two things that really aren't acceptable. I have no idea if it's improved since then.

narag3• 2 years ago

I'm happy for him, but I dislike that extension. It's one of the first things I disable in a new Windows installation. I prefer to deal with compressed files explicitly.

UberFly• 2 years ago

I so agree. I've helped so many people that don't understand what a zipped archive is because they just open like any other folder, but only in windows explorer. I turn that nonsense off and explain to them the ins and outs.

wongarsu4• 2 years ago

It's in that awkward state where it kind of works and is really convenient, but you hit its limitations and general slowness all the time. It's good enough that it hasn't been replaced (say by an extension that employs a filter driver to make ZIPs truly behave like folders to all applications), but bad enough that it's annoying and most power users end up with 7Zip or WinRar instead.

Lammy• 2 years ago

Back in '93 or so, I was working at Microsoft on COM, and at home for fun I started writing a shell extension to browse zip folders in the new Win95 user interface, making them appear as if they were just folders. That grew into a shareware product call VisualZIP.

Added to my local Windows 95 software archive: http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/pier-10se/047/VZIP150/in...

https://web.archive.org/web/19961228084852/http://visualzip.... seems to have been archived after the software was already sold to MS.

Its old TUCOWS download page suggests "Formerly ZIPExplorer" and it seems like that was in conflict with this ZipExplorer: https://web.archive.org/web/19980207094220/http://creative.n...

I'll probably never use it over WinZip 6.2 or whatever but that's a nice story and it will be cool to see how it compares to the version that eventually shipped with the 98 Plus! pack.

bc_programming• 2 years ago

This guy has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like he's grifting. Which isn't helped by the fact I've learned recently that apparently he literally did run a scam company and spread malware and got shut down by a state government, as other commenters have noted here.

According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98... "Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking."

Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft.

Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!"

It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there.

According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own:

    History:    Sep-26-96  Davepl  Created (from old VZip code)

This was a set of utility CIDL functions and not related to the zip functionality in Windows.

noAnswer• 2 years ago

That is interesting. There is also his story about 64bit Space Cadet Pinball which got disproven by NCommander. No one said he was lying, but maybe misremembering things, because evidently there is a working 64bit Space Cadet Pinball version. But he blocked every attempt to engage.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

first, being 25+ year old code, it's single threaded. It doesn't matter how many CPU cores you have, it only uses one.

Ah, yes, the reverse of the "Javascript changes too quickly and has too many libraries" problem; companies refusing to rewrite old code because "it still works".

I feel like we should all be striving for the perfectly balanced as all things should be moments in development, code should never be left to languish for years without updates, but nor should it be updated when the wind changes.

The Corvette that Windows zip folders bought

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