GoKawiilA former president of Microsoft’s Windows Division has been reminiscing about the lean and efficient coding regime at Microsoft in the 1980s. Steven Sinofsky surprised some commenters, who were talking about modern software’s RAM and resource use, by recalling that from 1980 to 1990 “every Microsoft eng got a stop watch,” adding that “Extras were in the supply room.” Stopwatches were used for “everything,” Sinofsky went on to explain. “Scroll speed. Boot. Exit. Save. Compilation. Print.”
From 1980-2000 half of software engineering was managing resource (clock time, disk, and ram) usage.For the first ten years every Microsoft eng got a stop watch. Extras were in the supply room.Tough to express just how much effort went into this. All of us have stories. https://t.co/kVGtjS4zwYMarch 30, 2026
Core products of the ‘stopwatch era’ would be MS‑DOS, Windows, Word, Excel, and Office – as well as programming languages and tools. Windows work would involve versions one through three, but of course, this period predates Windows 95; the clue is in the name. Sinofsky indicates that the same resrouce efficieincy based ethic continued to at least the year 2000, though. “From 1980-2000 half of software engineering was managing resource (clock time, disk, and RAM) usage,” he said on social media.
Do people prefer ‘whizzy spinning’ things to raw speed?
However, the ex-president of Windows told of one retrograde action implemented in software purposefully. Despite his stopwatch indicating otherwise, user feedback the dev team received was that the compile speed under Windows for VC++ 1.0 was slower than prior releases. Implementing a “whizzy spinning line counter made of random numbers… slowed the compile speed down a few pct points but perception improved,” noted Sinofsky. Moreover, despite not liking reworking purely for perception, and actually slowing raw performance, he reluctantly kept the whizz in.
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Interestingly, another well-known Microsoft / Windows veteran, Dave W. Plummer, responded to say that he was denied a free stopwatch in 1993. Actually, that is outside the freebie window, as told by Sinosfsky. Microsoft told Plummer that a stopwatch would be “too expensive,” he recalls. Humorously, Plummer says that “While I clearly resent it enough to bring it up 30+ years later, it went a long way toward setting the fiscal accountability I brought to the career.”
Microsoft’s new performance pledge
Sinofsky’s tale comes at an interesting point for Microsoft, particularly its Windows OS, which has been under heavy criticism for losing focus. Specifically, there’s a growing wave of resentment regarding the OS’s poor core performance, general resource hungriness, and devs throwing too much AI in the mix.
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft’s managers finally decided to face up to this reality and penned a surprisingly detailed blog post, promising that the situation would change over the course of this year. It has now pledged to implement performance, overhead, and reliability improvements across a swathe of core services like Explorer and Windows Update. It will also improve resource use and be more purposeful about where Copilot integrates.
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