Units of measurement

 Whenever people find out that I work at Microsoft, invariably the next question they ask is “Have you met Bill?” (The next question is: “So what’s with the stock?” – as if I had a magic 8-ball to tell them).

I’ve met Bill socially a couple of times (at various company functions); he doesn’t know who I am thoughJ.  But there was one memorable meeting I attended with him.

It was back in 1986ish; we were presenting the plans for Lan Manager 1.0 to him.  One portion of the meeting was about my component, DOS Lan Manager (basically an enhanced version of the MS-NET redirector, with support for a fair number of the Lan Manager APIs on the client).  My boss and I were given the job of presenting the data for that portion.

One of the slides (not Powerpoint, it didn’t exist at the time – Lucite slides on an overhead projector) we had covered the memory footprint of the DOS Lan Manager redirector.

For DOS LM 1.0, the redirector took up 64K of RAM.

And Bill went ballistic.

“What do you mean 64K?  When we wrote BASIC, it only took up 8K of RAM.  What the f*k do you think idiots think you’re doing?  Is this thing REALLY 8 F*ing BASIC’s?”

The only answer we could give him was “Yes”J.

To this day, I sometimes wonder if he complains that Windows XP is “16,000 F*ing BASIC’s”.

Edit: To add what we finally did with DOS Lan Manager's memory footprint. 

We didn't ignore Bill's comment, btw.  We worked on reducing the footprint of the DOS redirector by first moving the data into LIM Expanded memory, next by moving the code into expanded memory.  For LAN Manager 2.1, we finally managed to reduce the below 640K footprint of the DOS redirector to 128 bytes.  It took a lot of work, and some truely clever programming, but it did work.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2004
  Well he is the guy with the "nobody would ever need more than 64K of memory" guy, so that makes sense...very cool, thanks for sharing! :)
  
  btw, first you said the app was 64K, then at the end you said you reduced the footprint to 640K...did I miss something or was one of those a typo?

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2004
  > To this day, I sometimes wonder if he complains that Windows XP is “16,000 F*ing BASIC’s”.
  
  would be great if he actually did.
  
  > did I miss something or was one of those a typo?
  
  he meant that the footprint for redirector in LM2.1 is only 128 bytes in the conventional memory (which is the first 640k) it's a dos thing.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2004
  Wow! I'm really impressed. That you can post an anecdote like that about the richest man in the world and not get fired! (No, seriously, I do mean impressed. Most companies are still far too uptight to let all their employees blog like this. Bravo.)

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2004
  1986....That's back in the day b4 the stock went through the roof. I'm surprised you're not retired and sitting on some beach in Maui ;)
  -Mathew Nolton
  

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2004
  That's back in the day b4 the stock went public actually :). And many people ask me the same thing. What can I say, I love working.
  
  And I couldn't imagine working anywhere else. Think about the things I've done over the past 19 years:
  Worked on two versions of real-mode MS-DOS
  Worked on three or four versions of real-mode Lan Manager
  Worked on Windows NT 3.1-3.5
  Worked on a theoretical research project
  Worked on Exchange 4.0-2000
  Worked on an embedded processor for home automation
  Worked on the windows audio subsystem.
  
  All while working for the same company. Where else could you find those kind of opportunities?
  

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2004
  You are right. You really don't find that kind of commitment. Nor do you find many companies who stay on top long enough for you to do those types of things for many years. I worked in the R&D area of a B2B company (ClarusCorp) during the heyday. We did a lot (mostly) of Microsoft work. It was amazingly cool stuff and I stayed there for 5+ years. However, that company ran its course. I left before the final demise to do my own thing but it seems most software companies have a limited lifespan. They build, deploy, accumulate customers and get swallowed up or go out of business.
  
  

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2004
  8KB? Is BASIC really 3/4ths of UNIX?

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2004
  Please don't feed the trolls. Please don't feed the trolls. I keep saying that but I never listen :)
  
  I don't know of any implementation of unix that took up 12K for both code and data. K&R's first implementation was for a machine with 64K of RAM.
  

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2004
  I think the original PDP-7 Ken Thompson used had less than 64K, but then again that was hardly anything like the real UNIX on PDP-11s and such. I could dig up a pointer to Dennis Ritchies page but anyway...

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2004
  Matt, I don't use profanity when I speak, and I don't use it in my 'blog, so I edited it out.
  

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.nynaeve.net/?p=159

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Not surprisingly, as a peon, I don’t get to interact with Bill very often, so my few interactions are

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  PingBack from http://cellulitecreamsite.info/story.php?id=3230