Just a quick note: I used the original NT4 Task Manager, not even SP6 :-)

As a recently retired 27-year veteran of Microsoft myself, this demo kinda gets me in the feels. I wasn't in the NT product group, but I was in the field trying to get customers interested in it. Technology seems so temporary and disposable now, it's amazing to see something that was really built to last.

Story time: A friend of mine used to work on the shimming team at Microsoft (the team responsible for fixing backwards compatibility). One of his favorite topics were programs which decided not to use the built-in Windows APIs and instead would invent their own methods to accomplish a task. For example, a program (which won't be named) would run a check to see if it opened properly. It didn't use use the built in API for this task. Instead it asked the system for a list of all open windows and would check and see if it was on that list. The issue was it looked for a very precise window name something like 'Program Name - Microsoft Windows'. If it didn't see that exact name, it would attempt to open a new window. Well, during a change between Windows versions, there was a change in how window names were displayed (I forget exactly how) and, as a result, it would never find the exact name it was looking for. This lead to it endlessly spawning new windows until it crashed. This program was used by an MS exec or one of their family members so it became a problem a for the shimming team.

I know the two bugs probably do irk you, but I must say, the fact that they're are only two bugs, and that overall is it still function after 30 years is pretty damn impressive.

If you have the old code still it would be interesting to see what it would take to fix the couple of bugs.

64-bit from the start... what an excellent choice that was back then! Incredible to see +real+ engineering just _last_

Fun fact: even back then, six-core configs existed, like ALR revolution 6 (AKA Gateway 2000 NS9000) from 1997, featuring 6x Pentium Pros for _just_ $275k. FYI.

Around the year 2000, the big boss wanted me to use LED font in a product with a bitmapped display. It was a measurement device for the medical field. I dug in and prepared to resist. At a meeting, he said "the led font is more readable" ... and my response was: "If that were true, road signs would be in LED font, but they're not." --I got to use Helvetica Narrow instead. I'm still proud about how that UI looked. I did all the embedded code too. :-D

Hats off to you. It didn't crash when presented with an "impossible" configuration. Many programmers today don't know the first thing about "boundless data structures". The 9th core would crash their crap. (As a former lab instructor / TA, I've seen it thousands of times.) (see also: the arris/motorola D3.1 modem snafu. spec says "32x8" + "2x2", but the web UI crashes the instant it tries to handle the 33rd channel. I can only assume the SNMP agent works or it _should've_ failed testing.)

A good programmer writes for the "now" and a great programmer will also write for the "then". Great work, Dave!

I recall back in the mid 1990s, when, as far as I know, I was the first person to hack a HAL that would run on a 12-core machine we had. I'm pretty sure I brought it up on Win 3.5 first, then ported the HAL to NT4. I very distinctly remember those Task Manager painting bugs when we brought it up to be sure NT could see all 12 cores.

The Xp's Task manager is the perfect one.

Dave, you should update the old NT4 task manager as a project so that it displays the cores and memory correctly. 🙂 Love the video. Many thanks.

I didn’t expect a 30 year old application (albeit the NT 4 Task Manager) to actually run without too much trouble in Windows 11! NT 4 was among the first versions of NT I used. I did use NT 3.51 at work during the time I used NT 4 too. Dave, do you recall the infamous timing bug in Windows 95? I had a K6-2 350 with 95B. Reinstalling 95 on my system was not fun. I found myself staring at the Windows Protection Fault error more times than I could count. Installing the patch itself was a challenge. Looking back, I should have opted to upgrade to 98SE, but SE wasn’t yet released when I bought that computer in 98-99.

It'd be interesting to see a video on the Event Viewer too. Or even a series on the sysinternal tools.

Hi Dave, great video. I actually really like your old design of task manager more than the newer versions - just my opinion. I appreciate windows ability to run older code as not everything is as able to be continually updated especially software that interfaces with hardware like in industrial control environments. Cheers.

Love your content Dave! As a programmer and Windows fanboy, I appreciate your content so much! Thank you!

The fact that you can do this is an amazing feat and wonderful experiment. Thank you so very much!

It hurts me how awesome you are mate. I was 16 when I started working in IT, 1998, and it wasn't long before I was lucky enough to get an Abit BP6 motherboard. Dual socket. This meant I had to use Windows NT. Even now, gives me the warmest of memories!!!! Thanks for your content, it's so awesome

OK, watching old Taskmanager killing off the new one was way too enjoyable. It was a hoot. Thanks for that unexpected warm fuzzy. :)

That was pretty cool to see. Amazing how much and how little has changed over the years.

Wow that's really impressive! So forward thinking!

This was a lovely trip down memory lane! Thank you for sharing!

You’re a smart cookie. I love your channel. Thank you for the awesomeness you contributed to Windows 🙏🏼

Great video, Dave! As a retired MCT/MCSE/MCSA/MCT+I, I really enjoy your videos about Windows no matter what version! Thank you!

Thanks for sharing, Dave.

Love your channel dave! So much interesting content for young software devs to dive into

Thanks Dave! Always a pleasure.

Absolutely love this look back. Task manager was an absolute lifesaver for troubleshooting NT4. All I can say is thank you.

The Friendly Giant! That's one way to confirm you grew up in Canada back in the day. Such fond memories. Thanks, Dave.

Like I have a psychic bond with Dave. Randomly tuned in 20 seconds before premiere.

So happy you brought back the Friendly Giant outro!

Thanks Dave for the fun videos. 😊

The holy grail of my young nerdness in the 90s was when I was able to get a copy of NT4 Workstation from my friend's dad's MSDN subscription (he wrote SCSI drivers for Adaptec), and had NT4, Win98 and RedHat Linux triple booting on my AMD K6. Sorry Dave, I was just a kid and I couldn't afford NT4, but it was nice to be able to do all of my Windows stuff without my PC randomly crashing. It sure is fun to be able to see all sorts of behind the scenes stuff from those days of NT.

Ad a laiman, this was an answer to an otherwise un-asked question, yet still very satisfying to watch and learn. Pretty cool yo know how even and old program can still function and even "kill" it's predecessor. Awesome video and intriguing experiment.

Need another video where you fix the old TM to support 32/64 cores!

i love hearing every story about everything you contributed to in your career. one of the many engineers that gave us our current experience.

an analysis of the RecatOS task manager (the source code), same purpose, but created independently, would also be very interesting ..

I'm a retired Mainframe batch COBOL guy and I get a kick out of your videos Dave. It's like stepping over to the other side!

The XP one - which is very close to the NT4 one - should, in theory, be able to cope with that without bugs. It definitely did with 16 cores back when I tested it in a VM. By the way, this is impressive nonetheless. Were you also behind the XP one? Did you have access to better hardware?

I have never been so excited over so many What If's 😊

great video Dave. Greetings from Tunisia.

Perfect example of a principle I've tried o teach to many junior software engineers over the years. Don't put arbitrary limits on something based on your assumptions about how big something would get. There is a quote attributed to another MS programmer "no one will ever need more than 640K"... At one time I worked on software that was used to design 3D homes. There was code in place in many cases to limit the number of certain things, for example cabinets. At one point a user ran into this limit because they used cabinets to simulate the terrain of a lot they were designing a house to sit on. My point is don't assume that a limit is reasonable because customers are very creative and will find use cases for your software that you will not be able to anticipate. Generally speaking I try to make the limits based on whatever the numeric limits of the data type I'm using implies. In your multi core example, one could probably use an unsigned byte to store number of cores, which would imply 256... Which takes me back to the home design software where at one point I worked on blowing out the limit on number of floors in a building. As I recall I ended up pushing the limit well past 100 floors. I believe I went to 256 if I recall correctly. Which is significantly taller than the tallest building in the world even today. I mentioned this to a support guy and told him I could have it generate the stick framing for a 200+ floor building. His only comment was that while that was well and good, he would opt not to enter a building that tall that was built using normal framing methods....

First of all, I want to say: thank you! I discovered your channel few weeks ago only, and now i'm totally addicted to. While listening to your stories, my memory goes back to my first steps in Windows programming (1991, with QuickC for Windows): it has been for me a long and adventurous journey in a parallel and vast universe, populated by subsystems, APIs, hacks, specs and a lot of MSDN magazines reading; demigods like David Cutler, Steve Wood, Jeffrey Richter, Jeff Prosise, Don Box were the Lords of this world. Understanding OLE2 from scratch starting from the IUnknown interface was a revelation that changed my programmer life forever. I have gray hair now and I get payed only to control business figures (costs, savings, earnings.. :-( Over the years I used any sort of programming languages, OS and APIs... so I'm totally convinced that the combination of VB6 and VC6 is still the best RAD platform I've ever worked on to build Windows desktop applications. Pity that these tools can only live today within a virtual machine 😢 Please Dave, continue this way! I would also really appreciate stories about the programmers daylife at MSFT, testing, infamous bugs, hacks, etc.

Thanks for the video Dave! I personally prefer the old task manager - yours - as it takes up less window real estate. The Windows 8 task manager was nice too, but I 11 really sucks. I could go on and on why I don't like 11 or some of the other odd ball features, but I will leave it at that. Watching from Toronto, Canada.

Another very interesting video. I wonder if you knew the Age of Empires team? Or worked with Gabe Newell when he was at Microsoft? Were you around for Windows CE/Dreamcast/original Xbox? Windows Neptune? Longhorn? All of that history would be super interesting.

Great video. It would be an interesting project to solve this bugs and make Windows NT 4 Task Manager work on windows 11 correctly :)

It’s actually impressive you’d seen the future. I’ve ran plenty of 2000/xp programs that don’t even launch. You really think forward

It's always fun to watch developers show off their work. I never got into programming, I'm just your usual support tech/helpdesk guy.

It would be funny if you fix these bugs and update the UI to match with Windows 11 design and release it as "Classic Task Manager" or so :D

great - i like your windows history !

Backwards compatible is very important. The current IBM zSeries mainframe can still run code from the 1970s. I'm glad that MS takes this seriously. I still don't have warm feelings toward them due to some of their marketing ploys. But that is marketing, which is usually at least somewhat iffy.

Nice video Dave

"The first is that... unless you're a Mac developer I suppose - Everything needs to be backwards compatible". One of the best lines I've heard you utter. LOL

I remember that when I got my first new computer in late 1996 it had 16 MB of RAM, which was considered high-end at that time (it also had the fastest CPU of it's time, a Pentium 200 MHz). Then I read the section on memory expansion of the manual and it said that memory was expandable to up to 192 MB (4 SIMM slots, each supporting up to 32 MB + 1 DIMM slot for up to 64 MB) and I thought "who will ever need so much memory". I however did later expand the memory to up to 96 MB as I kept this PC until 1999 with various hardware upgrades and an upgrade from Windows 95 to 98. So I guess having Gigabytes of RAM was unimaginable in the sunmer of 1996 when Win NT 4.0 came out.

I am enjoying your book Dave. I have a pretty good suspicion I am on the spectrum as well.

Hey Dave, I like your Videos and I think a Video about Windows Search would be very interesting and how it evolved etc.

It would be the greatest thing to open task manager and see this guys face with a help guide. Url

This was Waaaay cooler than I thought it would be. This dude is a legend

Interesting. I'm curious how the Win2k version of the task manager would do better.. I'm pretty sure its source code was in the leak, so that'd be interesting to test I think.

I was working with a firm once where we gave them the normal (for 2005) hardware specs for a bare-bones IIS instance on Server 2003. I think it was something like "we need at least two cores and 32GB of RAM." They spun up a VM and EVERYTHING crawled. Couldn't even get the IIS screen up. Task manager took about two minutes to launch. They had provisioned 32 cores and 160MB.

Awesome work on your original code!!!! I always write my code to catch exceptions and deal with them. I also always code for multi thread my programs when possible/needed so if someone run it to '3. I hate when I am using a program and get and unhanded exception errors for something so stupid that lock up my system for a few min and either run or unhanded exception. It's some of the easiest thing to do and users will appreciate it, mainly by not knowing. Lol

Whoa, the Friendly Giant song at the end!

Legend. I love this channel.

Great video! Personally, I still prefer the look and feel of the "old" NT4 taskmanager over the ones in Windows 10 or 11.

Your a good man Dave

Very cool!👍

"Did you ever wonder-" "No, but I am interested now that you mention it."

Me: didn't Microsoft think that Windows NT might ever be running on a giant machine with more than 4 CPUs? Also me: Bill Gates once thought that 640k memory would be wildly more than enough in a personal computer.

I wish Google and Apple cared about backwards compatibility like Microsoft does. It's quite infuriating to see how those companies keep deprecating products and APIs every few years.

I looove that it at least MAKES the space for 32 cores in the GUI, ~almost did it! woooo!

Thank you!

Task manager battleroyale, the sport we all didn't know we want to watch, but we need it now.

I love your content

Not guessed already, but will be interesting results

Instead of using a VM to test 8 cores it would also have been possible to use the AMD Ryzen Master software to turn off 3 of the 4 chiplets (CCD). With 3 chiplets disabled it would've brought down the number of cores from 32 to 8, however you would also need to disable hyper threading to get it down to 8 logical processors.

I feel like I should be watching you build a big block chevy but this is cool too

I've got a system with a double Xeon E5 2670 setup so 16 cores, 32 threads. It's got 64 gigabytes of ram. I am running Windows 10 on this system currently but I downloaded "classic task manager" because it renders all of those little processor windows the way I remember it under NT and other systems and is quite fun to view it that way.

I do really, really, really appreciate Windows backward compatibility. So, much that I want to kiss you guys to keeping and maintaining Windows NT API in all existed Windows versions. Seems like newcomers want to mark everything as depricated.) Don't let them do that, currently I have so much pain in the back that MacOS depricates kext, lot of software I used, simply died. But not on good trusty Windows.

I hope you'll be releasing a hotfix for those bugs asap. Do you still have the source code that you could look back and see what is wrong?

Hi Dave, A real pleasure to watch your videos and you stories from development of Windows OS. If you can I will be interested about your experienced developer opinion about Design Principles and Design Patterns, there are a lot of debates on this subjects. I try to follow but every time I end by working more and write a ton of complex code just to achieve something simple, only for the sake of “design patterns”, because if you are not use it you are a “bad” programmer Thank you

Dave are you Canadian? That CBC reference at the end with The Friendly Giant brings me way back...

It doesn't surprise me that it's still solid. I basically ditched win 95 within 6 months of trying it and moved purely to NT for many years. NT (up until about win2k) was really the only MS product besides VS that I really liked. NT wasn't just solid, it was rock bloody solid.

I believe in an earlier video, you mentioned your version of taskmgr tried to maintain a single instance by issuing challenge codes to already-running instances, and whatever didn't respond could be presumed to have hanged. Do you think that challenge feature is still in the modern taskmgr (with different codes)? Or is there a better sanctioned API way of doing this now?

I love the ending. Good memories.

i love the 7 segment font so much, but it really was a localization nightmare lol. localization was something i never truly thought much about until i saw an excel spreadsheet written by someone who reads right to left in their native language.

What a lovely throwback seeing a Cyrix CPU again.

I was half expecting you to patch it live and be like "cool I fixed it."

"unless you're a mac developer I suppose" HAHAHAA, Shots fired! Will they ever recover!

Wild it still works that well

Well I for sure expected you to fix the taskmanger nt4 😂

You should do a video on what the Commit charge and other performance metrics means in task manager.

Will you patch the taskman.exe for NT4 for shits and giggles?

Just to point out, you don't actually need the command prompt to launch the NT4 task manager after expanding it. You can just open Explorer, and double-click the file. I just did it on my Windows 10 PC, but I "only" have 8 cores so it looked like your first segment before you added more cores.

as a geeky kid in the start 2000 our first (what i consider computer we had) was a compaq with windows 2000/nt version. all the previous consoles (as what we used them for) was amiga 500, atari play systems and snes. we never really had much money because of my dads constant lending money for stuff he didn't need. so we were very tech cryplet. but i got to use old shit way past their prime but somehow think it gave me a bit of an edge later in life. being way more confident to just jump into stuff head first. trying out new things. breaking and fixing stuff and learning alot on the way!

Hey, Dave great stuff as always. Do you have any idea why old default programs need to be patched in order to work on new windows versions (10, 11) ? Stuff like windows xp spider game, or win 7 calculator, you can download them, but they don't have microsoft digital signature, and if you take one from system32 yourself, it doesn't work on newer versions.

*@Dave's Garage* Would be fun if you released a patch now for that old task manager :D

What strikes me is that the modern task manager is in the ballpark of 4MB, and uses 50MB of RAM. Windows 95 ran the entire machine on 8 MB, NT on 12. The entire system, applications and all. Sure, 16 was better (a lot better), but if all you had was 12MB, you could still run Netscape Navigator on NT4, and actually look at website. These days, Edge is taking in excess of 100MB to open two tabs that could have been shown in NN4 with little to no difference in the look&feel. What in the world happened in the last 30 years, that the space that used to contain an entire encyclopedia isn't enough for the GPU drivers?

Id like to see a hime lab tour!

A cool video would be you fixing those 2 bugs in the original task manager :)