Guido Vandecasteele (Fully Buffered)

This is the Corvette that Windows zip folders bought. 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. Then one day just before heading into work, I got a call from a lady at Microsoft. She wanted to know if I was the Dave Plummer who wrote VisualZIP, and long story short, they wanted to buy it, and could I come in to talk about it at some point? I said "Sure, what's your office number, I'll stop by!" and it kinda freaked her out. She said "No, no, we'd have to coordinate with travel and legal..." but I was confused as to why I'd need to book travel to talk to someone where I already worked! And THEN I figured it out. She didn't know that I already worked for Microsoft, and I didn't know that she didn't know. So that was a bit awkward. But we worked it out. In the end, my choices were pretty limited - either quit my day job and compete with Microsoft, or do what I wound up doing instead: cheerfully accepting their first, best, and only offer. So that's what I did! I accpepted their offer, paid the taxes on it, and bought a lightly used red 1994 Corvette LT1. There wasn't much left over. So next time you open a zip file on Windows, think of my car :-) If you've ever wondered why the zip support is so slow today, there are two main reasons: first, being 25+ year old code, it's single threaded. It doesn't matter how many CPU cores you have, it only uses one. Second, because of the way the shell used to work, you couldn't just hand it the contents of a file, you had to give it a local file path as the source. So the code first extracts the file to a temporary location, hands that location to the shell, and the shell copies the file. In other words, there's an extra temp copy operation involved in every operation. 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. I don't see them improving it any time soon, but they have added more compression formats like RAR to the mix, so you never know. If you enjoy these random nostalgic looks back, follow me for more! And heck, if you made it this far, you might as well share it too :-)