The NT4 Task Manager vs 32 Cores: Will it choke?

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

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

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.)

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.

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 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.

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

The Xp's Task manager is the perfect one.

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

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

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

Love your channel dave! So much interesting content for young software devs to dive into <3

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.