Hey, I'm Dave welcome to my shop!
I'm Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems engineer from Microsoft going all the back
to the Windows 95 and MS-DOS days, and today I'm going to tell you the Secret History of
Microsoft Gary.
Gary was aa dude down the hall from me who did likely did more than any human being since
Guttenberg to democratize access to the printing press.
I also want to make you aware of an upcoming livestream on Sunday night and to get your
suggestions for an upcoming interview.
All that and more this time in Dave's Garage.
Before we talk about Gary, I wanted to let you know that I'm planning to do a Windows
War Stories livestream and I'd like to encourage you to join me.
It's my first one and I'd be sad if no one turned up, so do me a solid and stop on by.
We'll be getting together at 7PM PST Sunday night, which is 10PM Eastern, on the 24th
of January, right here on the Dave's Garage channel.
I'll be available for your questions and I'd like to pick your brains for ideas on upcoming
episodes for the series.
I'm also excited to announce that I'll be having a special guest on an upcoming episode,
a former Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft.
To that end I'd like to find out what questions you might have about interviewing, hiring,
firing, stock options, reviews, and more - really anything related to HR.
Please leave me a comment on this video with your suggestions, and of course there's no
better way to get your question heard than to stop by that livestream on Sunday night!
And now, I want to talk about a guy named Gary down the hall from me.
Gary started a while after me, in 1997, I think.
I believe we were in building 25 or 26 at the time, and I'd heard that Gary was an expert
in something to do with color science and had a bunch of patents, but a lot of the people
around me were experts at one thing or another, and the NT team was so full of industry veterans
that most everybody had a dozen patents it seemed.
Heck, even I've got a half dozen.
But for most people if you are lucky enough to get exposed to even a few experts now and
then during your life, you're doing pretty good.
I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a ton of them.
I mean three doors in the other direction was Raymond Chen.
That's like saying Google you lived three doors down from Google, because either way,
you can ask them pretty much anything and they'll know the answer.
In multiple languages even.
In fact, they seem to know the answer with such ease that it's easy for it to become
a reflex to just ask before even thinking really very hard, and while Google is eager
to show you multiple ad impressions, Raymond doesn't suffer fools quite as gladly.
But "expert" means different things to different people.
On the one hand, you have a lot of self-described experts in the world, people eager to tell
you why they're outstanding in their own fields, some even oozing expertise and sincerity for
the highest bidder as expert witnesses in almost any field you can imagine.
At the other end of the spectrum are people that truly are the quiet experts in their
important fields but who so lack the gene for self-promotion that their contributions
can almost go unheralded or even unknown.
I don't know if I had a reputation for this around the halls of Microsoft, but even if
not, I certainly deserved one as a bit of a "time burglar".
By that I mean I tended to work heads down for hours at a time without talking to anyone
and then I wanted 5 or 10 minutes of social interaction which I would get by wandering
by your office and telling you my favorite and most relevant anecdotes.
Probably my favorite victim for this was a guy named Jon Berry.
About three times a week I'd wander into his office to chat and flip through his magazines,
no doubt getting my donut crumbs all over his copy of Microprocessor Report.
I'd sit for a minute and tell him my random theories and musings on the new Simpsons episode
before heading back to my office so that we could both get some real work done.
Jon was also my boss in those days, so I don't know how smart it was to waste his time like
that, but then he knew that that I knew that he only subscribed to Microprocessor Report
for the respect, so we had an understanding.
With some people though I know when to shut up and just listen.
Like I have an old friend Jim, a 70-year-old curmudgeonly Vietnam combat veteran who still
runs his own automotive repair and custom fabrication shop near my home.
Going to his shop, which I do at least a couple times a week, is a little like visiting the
Barber shop in the movie Gran Torino.
Except there's more lot more profanity and smoking, and the Playboy centerfolds are hung
proudly on the walls rather than hidden away in the magazines.
Jim knows all there is to know about repair and welding and the fabrication of classic
and race cars.
And I'm the kind of guy where if you know a lot about a topic, and if I know that you're
a rare resource about a topic and I'm seriously interested in that topic, as I am with cars,
then I will pepper you with questions about the topic whenever we're together until I'm
sure you've told me all there is to know about the topic or until it becomes obvious to me
that it's time to stop, or worst case, until you will just no longer talk to me any further.
If you're thinking that behavior sounds a little on the Spectrum, I once speculated
to Jim that I thought I might be a little Autistic.
His response?
Just a little, huh?
The other guy that's always been around the shop has been Rick, and I don't actually have
a picture of Rick, but thanks to a little prosopagnosia, to me he looks exactly like
Wilford Brimley, so you might as well just go ahead and picture him as Wilford Brimley,
except working on an engine dyno.
That's because Rick used to be a Winston cup engine builder for a famous NASCAR racing
team down South before he retired up to my area to putter on the engine dyno at Jim's
shop and build engines in the back room.
Now between Jim and Rick, they've got three eyes, one pancreas, and more types of different
cancers than ten men should really have.
And while Jim is well and still plugs away all day in the shop, between Cancer and Covid
I haven't seen much of Rick in a long time.
The 427 big block he hand-built for my 2+2 that I'm restoring may well have been among
his last, but one of the highlights was dyno-tuning the motor with my brother, Rick, Jim, and
a guy named Larry Webb.
Larry looks like and has the swagger of an old Paul Newman but he's really there because
he spent about 60 years at General Motors working on carbs and fuel injection and for
all I know he literally probably worked on the design of the Rochester Quadrajet carburetor
that my motor actually came equipped with back then, and Jim just happens to know him.
Pretty handy for me!
It'd be something like having Eric Clapton stop by to tune your guitar.
When he couldn't find a factory metering rod that was within a thousandth of an inch of
what he felt was needed, he turned his own on Jim's lathe, right then and there.
If you're not sure what that means, just know that any sufficiently manly task is akin to
magic, and it was pretty magical to watch.
In the end there are two things you can be sure of that day: that motor ran balls out
on the dyno and was dead nuts to the factory spec, and I asked that Larry guy a ton of
questions about carburetors in the little time I had with him.
I joked earlier that I could wear out my welcome with questions, but these days I'm self-aware
enough to know when to stop bugging people, or least I hope I am.
Larry, the General Motors guy, kind of parachutes in and does his thing and leaves without a
lot of BS or time to chat.
Rick, as friendly as he's always been, can almost seem a little secretive at times but
that might just be a vibe he gives off after years in NASCAR, where winning and losing
is everything and secrets protect championships and endorsements worth millions of dollars.
A guy that's long made a living not telling you anything he knows may not be ready to
tell you everything he knows the minute he retires.
Jim, on the other hand, is always willing to share.
Like just last week he was troubleshooting an old pickup that would fire up but then
die immediately after starting with a big belch back out the intake and carb.
He did some troubleshooting to rule out the obvious before the end of the day but ultimately
closed up shop for the day without a solution.
He awoke in the middle of the night with a start, because he suddenly knew the answer:
the muffler had rusted which caused the metal to expand internally and it had therefore
become restricted.
It was good enough for cranking the engine over, but once combustion actually started,
the sudden backpressure would overwhelm the intake charge, overpower the piston, reverse
the engine's rotation briefly, and hence the backfire.
Secure in the knowledge of what it was, he fell back asleep and slept solid till morning,
when he confirmed his theory was in fact correct.
That only happened to me once, in about 1994.
I was on the COM/RPC/OLE team, and I'd been working on the OLE Presentation Cache.
That's what does the drawing when, for example, you have a Word document that contains an
Excel chart - you don't want to actually load and invoke the Excel program to paint it every
time you scroll on by, so OLE actually does it for you, and it supports a number of formats
like bitmap and metafile.
I was brand new and I was assigned a bunch of bugs related to adding support for Win32's
new Enhanced Metafiles to the Presentation Cache.
I skimmed a few thousand lines of existing code to get a feel for it, then got to work
on a few of the actual bugs.
One of them involved elements of the picture being scaled comically small for some reason
in certain weird cases.
One night at home I too awoke with a start.
I knew where the bug was, and it actually woke me out of a deep sleep.
I think I'd dreamt it and when I saw the bug in the dream, it somehow woke me.
I stumbled to my den and used a variety of ancient tools.
First, I used a "modem" to connect to an "ISP".
Then I ran Trumpet Winsock or some such nonsense to get an IP address, which I then used to
connect to a "telnet" proxy at Microsoft campus, then connected a console window that connected
to my work machine, and so on.
There were a lot of hoops to jump through, but (a) it was still 1994 and the web wasn't
even really a thing yet, and (b) getting at the Windows source code with a modem probably
should be hard!
Regardless, I got at it and jumped right to the code that I had dreamed contained the
bug.
Sure enough, in something to do with screen pixel to HIMETRIC conversion, there truly
was an error in the math.
It was actually off by a factor of 100.
Somehow, I'd suddenly remembered the code, or delay processed it after having skimmed
it earlier, or some such thing.
I wasn't going to change the code in the middle of the night and check it in, I wasn't quite
that confident, so I did what we did in 1994, in a process that would later become verboten:
I put a BUGBUG comment in the code and went back to bed.
I too slept like a baby secure in the knowledge that tomorrow I would start the day with an
easy fix teed up, ready to go.
When I got to work, I veritably sprinted to my desk and brought the code up in SlickEdit,
as was the style of the day.
And sure enough, it was indeed a bug, and it was off by 100.
But if you zoomed out a little bit, you could see that it was also inside #ifdef MAC.
Sadly, it only affected the Macintosh version of Office, not all of Windows.
So, it was A bug but not THE bug I was looking for.
You win some and you lose some.
But what does all this have to do with Gary and asking old guys questions?
Well, the thing is I'm older now, and I ask a lot more questions than I used to.
I'm less likely to need to hear myself speak, as it were, than when I was younger man.
And in the case of guys like Rick and Jim, they're happy to chat because they're not
really on the clock, but the people at Microsoft most definitely were.
So as much as I would have liked to, I never once stopped by Dave Cutler's office just
to ask him why we didn't just use Xenix instead of starting fresh with NT.
And if I had, it's not like there would have been a bunch of young programmers sitting
cross-legged on the floor as he regaled them with stories of his VMS days.
We had actual work to do, and it was bad enough if I wasted a few minutes of your time telling
you why what you just said or did reminded me of some episode of a cartoon and why that's
perhaps ironic or meaningful.
Perhaps you'll forgive me then, then I tell you about Gary.
Gary was an older fellow on our team.
How much older?
He was literally of my father's generation, actually being two years older than my own
Dad.
Being new to Microsoft he had an interior, windowless office, since they were normally
given out based on seniority.
For all appearances he might have been a new contractor, but it didn't matter either way;
he seemed smart enough and was nice enough, and always cheerful, and so Gary was just
the guy a couple of doors down from me.
He was on the NT Print team.
The NT Print team was a peer to the NT UI team, which is where I was, and we all reported
to the same guy, Leif Pederson.
But since we didn't work together on the same stuff, our only real time together would be
at lunch and in the break room, where you make the same small talk you would at any
company.
Along the way I learned that he had been at Apple at some point in the past, and even
Pixar.
He had a great story about them winning an actual Oscar, and how he was bummed to find
out that he wasn't going to get to accept it on the red carpet because that's not how
they do they technical Oscars.
But if you added up all the three-minute private conversations we had, that's about the highlight
of what I learned.
Otherwise, we went for lunch as a group and so on, but people don't really share personal
details in a group situation in the same way.
After a reorg or office shuffle I didn't see him much after a while, and then we both retired,
and I never saw him again.
Then, one day about 20 years later I was walking by one of my kids who was watching a video
on YouTube - Technology Connections or some such thing.
And up pops a picture of a guy that I'm sure I know, and as you've no doubt guessed, it
was Gary.
I walked over and asked my son to turn up the volume, and I learned something new.
He had been watching an episode on the invention the laser printer, and it just so happened
that Gary was its inventor.
It turned out that Gary wasn't just Gary from lunch, he was Gary Starkweather, actual inventor
of the one and only laser printer.
And it turns out Gary wasn't just "at Pixar" when "Pixar won an Oscar".
In fact, he had done pioneering work on color film scanning for them and for Lucasfilm before
them.
He must have worked for George Lucas for a long time, because it turns out that Gary
from the hallway was also a digital effects consultant on the original Star Wars movie
in 1977.
Yeah, that one.
Maybe you've seen it.
Gary also won the David Richardson Medal recognizing his significant contributions to optical engineering
back before I'd even dropped out of let alone gone back to high school, so he was well on
his way to a successful career well before he did things like invent Color Management
for the likes of Apple Computer.
Because Gary from the break room wasn't just Gary that used to be at Apple, he was an honest
to goodness Apple Fellow, one of the Few.
Other little things he'd failed to mention?
Oh, like he worked at Xerox Parc, which is where he did the inventing of the never-mentioned
laser printer.
But not only did he work there, he was Xerox Parc employee number 23.
And it goes on.
Had I known any of this, even had an idea or an inkling, I'd like to think I would have
asked him a lot more questions and hopefully cajoled him into telling me a lot more stories.
It's hard to know, I was a lot younger then.
Seeing Gary's photo on YouTube made me nostalgic and curious about him, so I looked him up,
only to find out that he'd passed away about a year ago, at the age of 81, down in Florida.
If you bring up all his pictures in Google images, he's smiling in every single one of
them.
That's not that uncommon for photos, perhaps.
But I think it's true to reality, since Gary was smiling pretty much every time that I
ever saw him in real life too.
Lasers and optics are cool and maybe he was responsible for the greatest step in democratizing
the printing press since Guttenberg, but the main thing I remember about the person is
that Gary was irrepressibly cheerful.
Either aspect of the person would be fine, but I love it when they're combined like that.
Suffice to say I wouldn't be hearing any new stories from Gary, so I figured the least
I could do would be to share one of my favorite old ones that I do know with all of you.
As I said, Gary had been a serious guru in the field of lasers and optics.
I now know that he'd been granted something like 40 patents in the area of the laser printer,
and many if not most of them were to do with the optics.
All I knew back then though, is what he said:
He was at some big graphics conference or tradeshow, and he was looking at a fancy new
laser printer of some sort that was being introduced to great fanfare as revolutionary.
They were showing off the exciting new technology inside, which somehow involved a pentaprism...
Gary congratulated them on their discovery, and then noted that he already held the patent
on it and had for some time.
The guy doing the show about turned white and almost collapsed on the spot.
Pretty soon the Xerox brass and a bunch of corporate attorneys were involved.
They eventually agreed that the new device likely did transgress on Gary's patent, but
the opposing lawyer said that the invention seemed obvious, and that anyone could have
come up with it.
That's when Gary delivered one of my favorite lines: "If it was so damned obvious, why didn't
YOU invent?"
Turns out he was right, and Xerox made some money off the infringement.
I should add that's nothing new, though.
After all, the laser printer generated billions for Xerox and paid for everything else that
Xerox PARC ever did, many times over.
Fortunately, this story is also one of the ones preserved in an oral history that Gary
recorded for the Computer History Museum, and it's available online, as is a written
transcript.
I could read it aloud to you now, but it's perhaps best that I just put a link to it
and encourage you to have a look or a listen for yourself.
Even if you were to just google his name, Gary Starkweather, you'd learn some cool stuff.
But I'll make it even easier by providing links in the video description, including
a couple on how his invention, the laser printer, actually works.
If you don't already know, it's actually pretty clever!
The moral of the story is pretty obvious, especially if you're young.
If you've got access to people like a Jim, or a Rick, or a Gary - get them talking and
just shut up and listen.
Don't bother trying to impress them with your own exploits.
If they're not the chatty type, go ahead and ask them questions.
Most older experts, particularly successful older people, are actually eager to find a
worthy young mind with which to share what they've learned.
All you need to do is appear genuinely interested and ready to put it to work.
Learn everything you can from them, because there's some folks - like Larry the fuel injection
wizard - where the field is such that not only their legacy but their knowledge kind
of lives and dies with them.
What they don't share simply because people don't ask could be lost to the ages.
So always be sure to ask a lot of questions.
By the way, if you enjoyed this particular episode but you're not yet subscribed to my
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me one of each before going.
I'm trying to grow the channel so if there's somewhere you can share this episode, like
an appropriate place to list it on reddit for a forum, that sort of thing, please do
so!
It's kind of a niche interest but odds are if you were interested then you know someone
else who's enough like you to be interested too, so send them a link.
And don't forget to head on over to Dave's Garage at 7PM Pacific, 10PM Eastern, this
Sunday, the 24th of January, for my first ever livestream.
The more the merrier, so bring a friend.
I'm looking forward to your ideas and suggestions!
Thanks for joining me here in the shop.
In the meantime, and in between time, I hope to see you next time, here in Dave's Garage.