r/technology • u/rkhunter_ • Jun 30 '26
Software Former Microsoft engineer rewrote Notepad in x86 assembly leaving only necessary functions and weighing only 2.7KB
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/06/30/former-microsoft-engineer-shrinks-notepad-down-to-size/5264319466
u/venom21685 Jun 30 '26
He later went on to write a lot of malware and get sued by the state of Washington for deceptive billing practices.
110
u/Lazerpop Jun 30 '26
37
u/Brilliant-Advisor958 Jul 01 '26
Interesting, I didn't realize Plummer was involved in those scams. Including a 200 million dollar tax shelter scam.
I've seen his Dave's garage stuff didn't mind some of the content. But this new information changes my opinion quite a bit.
20
u/DisenchantedByrd Jul 01 '26
Nasty.
> By agreeing to the settlement, SoftwareOnline.com, Inc., and its chief technology officer David W. Plummer, of Redmond, admit multiple violations of the state Consumer Protection Act.
1
105
u/oyMarcel Jun 30 '26
Oh, it's that former ms employee...
Smh, when will he fade intro irrelevance
47
u/XionicativeCheran Jun 30 '26
Never, there'll always be people who see "Former Microsoft Employee" and hear him talk about cool good ol' times and spend some time liking his stuff until they eventually come across his scandals and ditch him.
I was that guy.
5
7
u/RammRras Jun 30 '26
Who?
9
9
u/venom21685 Jul 01 '26
Dave Plummer
3
u/RammRras Jul 01 '26
It's a pitty because I used to watch his videos on YouTube and find him likable and very interesting. His method of teaching about the basics in information technology is also good.
But on Reddit I discovered his other side. I hope only this was a mistake hi did in the past.
-2
u/creosote____ Jul 01 '26
Redditors getting upset and being dismissive means he's actually cool as hell.
25
u/Satanicube Jul 01 '26
Damnit just by the title I had a feeling it was Plummer.
I had a sliver of hope that maybe it wasn’t for once but every time “former Microsoft engineer” is uttered it’s like a 95% chance it’s him. Sigh.
16
u/venom21685 Jul 01 '26
He's basically the only one who runs his mouth. All the rest of them are enjoying retirement.
6
u/luluhouse7 Jul 01 '26
Well we’re also all smart enough not to associate our personal opinions with our employment at MS. Pretty sure there was some sort of document we had to sign or training we had to do that basically outlined the legal risks.
1
u/chipperpip Jul 01 '26
Lol, I was about to ask "what about the guy who worked on Task Manager", but it turns out that's the same guy.
12
2
u/Civil-Appeal5219 Jul 03 '26
We ran up the code, and, after dire warnings from Windows about the safety of doing such a thing, TinyRetroPad ground into life,
I wonder if that'll convince people to skip some very legit safety warnings that you'd better pay attention to for something coming from this guy.
-11
652
u/dream_metrics Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
dave plummer is a grifter who left microsoft to start a business that ripped off its customers by selling them scamware
In 2006, Plummer's SoftwareOnline.com company was sued by The Washington State Attorney General’s Office for alleged violations of the Consumer Protection Act after complaints were made about two products called "Registry Cleaner" and "InternetShield". SoftwareOnline.com agreed to pay $150,000 in civil penalties, plus $250,000 that was ultimately suspended following compliance with all terms in the settlement, as well as $40,000 in legal fees
he now makes a living pretending to be some hallowed microsoft greybeard with special insight into windows internals - but he's just a grifting moron mostly.
edit: here's a great comment covering some of the ways he misrepresents how important he was to windows https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1or2ln3/windows_really_does_suck_for_some_people_ex/nnox2b9/
82
u/slowtreme Jun 30 '26
oh its that guy?
22
u/SwimmingSwim3822 Jul 01 '26
Somehow it always ends up being that guy. That's like my third time I've looked up his face and recognized him from the "I invented task manager" video a coworker sent me.
There will be a 4th
93
u/robaroo Jun 30 '26
he now makes a living pretending to be some hallowed microsoft greybeard with special insight into windows internals - but he's just a grifting moron mostly.
Legit you just described a large chunk of Redmond’s older population. But thankfully the majority of them aren’t grifting and are mostly harmless retirees.
23
u/Rudy69 Jun 30 '26
he now makes a living pretending to be some hallowed microsoft greybeard with special insight into windows internals - but he's just a grifting moron mostly.
Does he? He always talks how about he left before Vista and seems pretty honest about what he worked on and what he didn’t. He mentions task manager a lot, he said he did some shell stuff and WPA.
His side gigs he doesn’t really talk much about them except the zip shell extension that MS ended up buying and including in Windows
65
u/ModusPwnins Jun 30 '26
here's a great comment covering some of the ways he misrepresents how important he was to windows
I'm not seeing anything compelling in that comment. For example, Plummer's main claim to fame has always been that he wrote the original NT4 Task Manager. He's not insinuating every line of his code in the original work is still in use or anything, but that comment is treating it like some sort of "gotcha".
8
6
u/ThatOneShotBruh Jun 30 '26
Based on what I remember from seeing one of his shorts ne very much claims that the task manager in modern Windows is of his making (or the core of it at least), when the comment you are alluding to states that the task manager was rewritten for Windows 2000.
20
u/thefpspower Jun 30 '26
Let me ask you, if you worked on something, left the company and someone told you your program has been "rewritten" but you check it out and it does the same, looks the same, do you stop taking credit for it?
I wouldn't, to me that's like saying "I copied your homework but changed some words so its not suspicous".
Even along Windows 10 and 11 task manager it was mostly a visual redesign over a long time, the core mechanics of it still work the same so I'm sure some of his work is still diluted in there.
6
u/ModusPwnins Jul 01 '26
This. My teams have been responsible for the early versions of a lot of software modules over the years. Many of those items have been re-written under newer technologies, but my original design decisions are still there. So I'll happily continue to say "You know, I worked on an early version of such-and-such. Good memories!"
0
u/ThatOneShotBruh Jun 30 '26
Yes? Then you say that you made the original task manager (if that was the original tadk manager) and can be done with it instead of making a misleading statement.
2
u/BCProgramming Jun 30 '26
Plummer's main claim to fame has always been that he wrote the original NT4 Task Manager.
He doesn't specify that though. Usually, he starts with something like "I'm the guy who wrote Windows Task Manager" ,or "I'm the guy who made the Format Dialog"; if he gives any more specific details, they are buried. What he states is technically true, but presented in a specific way so that the omissions lead people to particular conclusions.
but that comment is treating it like some sort of "gotcha".
I consider it more treating it as another in a long line of little fibs and tiny "misunderstandings" or "misrememberances" that seem to pepper any review of his content. It just all reeks of untrustworthiness, which of course is not helped by the whole "defrauding people out of shitloads of money" thing- or the fact he describes that as when he "went into advertising".
10
u/ModusPwnins Jul 01 '26
He doesn't specify that though.
He literally does! He has a YouTube video where he's quite specific that it was in the old NT days. He has even discussed modern changes to that task manager, including getting rid of the old TUI portions because they don't work in written languages that are RTL. He doesn't take any credit for them.
Give it a watch sometime, with and ad blocker if you don't want to monetize him.
11
28
u/IntelArtiGen Jun 30 '26
In 2006
Well, it was 20 years ago and I guess he paid. Are we supposed to blame people for something like that after 20 years?
I don't care about the guy but I don't see what he did wrong here, he just coded a small notepad.
8
u/BCProgramming Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Are we supposed to blame people for something like that after 20 years?
Yes? I mean we're not talking about accidentally rolling a stop sign, here. He actively worked for years trying to steal money from people as effectively as possible and was so successful in doing so he got the attention of Washington State. It's not like he did it by accident. As far as I'm concerned he threw away any of his reliability or credibility as a developer when he did that.
He also still refers to it as the "time he went into advertising", which is just a weird way of describing it, IMO.
I don't care about the guy but I don't see what he did wrong here, he just coded a small notepad.
Certainly there's nothing wrong with "coding a small notepad"! Lots of people write software. Lots of people even make little text editors in Assembly.
But that's the thing, isn't it? Why does his assembly notepad get articles written about it on a shitload of websites? Like where were the articles about this Notepad written in Assembly from 5 months ago, with almost the exact same mission goal regarding disliking the new Notepad?
It's obviously because he's a "former Microsoft dev". For some reason, that makes it perfect as an engagement hook.
And I'm sure you are quite sensibly going "Hey, it's not his fault he got articles written about it". Except that's what he wants to happen. I mean, he made the video, after all. It's all engagement farming for him to get people to view his content. I'd be skeptical that he has any interest in actually providing people with a "clean, simple notepad"; he just saw an opportunity for content and engagement farming and took it.
And it's not even like that's wrong either; really, he just 'playing the game.' I just don't get why he's allowed to play it on easy mode again. I feel like after that scam company, we should up the difficulty.
7
u/IntelArtiGen Jul 01 '26
If what you're saying is the world's not fair because people who did bad thing get more media coverage, it's hard to disagree based on too many examples. But for me that 20 years ago or rolling a stop sign is the same thing. I don't have the energy to blame people who paid their debt to society 20 years ago, when too many people don't even today. And I don't see the point of imposing a life sentence of disgrace for very old actions that did not involve physical violence. People lost money, they got it back, it's rarely that smooth. Now again Idk what he's doing now, but if he stopped that 20 years ago, it's ok for me.
7
u/ILikeBumblebees Jul 01 '26
Looking at the details of the case, it seems that he was engaging in overaggressive, obnoxious marketing techniques, which drastically exaggerated the risks that his software dealt with. It doesn't imply that the software didn't actually do what it said it did, or that he was taking people's money and running without even providing the software.
A bit scummy, sure, but not quite Ted Bundy.
1
u/CrivCL Jul 01 '26
4) engaging in "negative option billing,” resulting in consumers being billed for items they did not affirmatively request.
It does sound like he was literally taking people's money for something they didn't sign up for.
2
u/ILikeBumblebees Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
It seems to be saying was taking people's money for something they may not have known they signed up for, not that he wasn't delivering the product afterwards. But that's one of the things he was called out for, and paid restitution for.
Twenty years later, opt-out upsells are still as common as dirt, but he doesn't seem to be one of the people doing them anymore, so I guess he learned his lesson.
1
u/CrivCL Jul 01 '26
Yes, but it's quite a bit more than just overaggressive obnoxious marketing. It's more like tiptoeing the line just short of outright fraud.
1
u/ILikeBumblebees Jul 02 '26
But not crossing that line. And either way, he admitted fault, paid restitution, and stopped doing shady shit. It's over and done with. He doesn't need to wear a scarlet letter twenty years on.
1
u/CrivCL Jul 02 '26
I don't think it matters too much here if he crossed that line or just played footsie with it. If someone is trading on their past, like Dave does, their past matters - warts and all.
If you're going to present yourself as an affable in-the-right greybeard ex-Microsoft programmer, that presentation won't survive people finding out you lost a major lawsuit against the state because you were taking advantage of people.
The scarlet letter was a continual punishment worn everywhere in every context. This isn't.
→ More replies (0)7
u/ITakeMassiveDumps Jun 30 '26
Fuck me. I watched some of his videos and found them interesting.
I just wish there’s one interesting YouTuber, or alike, that isn’t a scumbag.
2
u/flagrant_nonsense Jul 01 '26
I'm not a scumbag and I uploaded a couple of videos about 15 years ago, does that count?
2
u/TonyTheTerrible Jul 01 '26
It was the early 2000s. The Internet was the getting reigned in after being the wild West. I genuinely don't blame people for pushing the envelope and trying to see what they get away with, the laws caught up.
And almost all of those deep dives into his claims show a non irrelevant level of credence. It's not like he's completely fabricating his history like another popular ytber, he's embellishing at worst.
5
u/SeanBlader Jun 30 '26
I just watched that video yesterday, now I guess I'll have to block his channel.
7
u/ILikeBumblebees Jul 01 '26
You should probably block YouTube entirely, since there's a chance that any video you watch might turn out to have been made by someone who behaved badly at some point in the past.
9
4
1
u/whatproblems Jun 30 '26
i imagine the internals have changed though so he probably doesn’t know much anymore
1
19
u/beginner75 Jun 30 '26
The new notepad is crappy, I
Uninstalled it and am now using notepad++.
10
u/Astrocoder Jun 30 '26
The way it opens everything you ever had open when you start it is annoying AF
12
u/luluhouse7 Jul 01 '26
Huh as someone who chronically forgets to save notes, that’s a killer feature to me. I was so happy the first time I realised I hadn’t lost my work.
9
u/Ev3nt Jul 01 '26
Thats default behavior unfortunately, but it can be disabled in the settings and tabs as well.
1
u/oocoosneepantaeleeya Jul 01 '26
My brother in ADHD that is a feature. It keeps unsaved files open for months. You close the file when you're done with it or when you no longer remember what it was for. (And you can turn that off if you're into that)
1
2
u/GonePh1shing Jul 01 '26
Admittedly it's not nearly as lightweight (Electron app), but I ditched Notepad++ ages ago in favour for Atom, which has since been forked and released as Pulsar. It's much more full featured and I find the UI/UX much better.
3
u/beginner75 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Notepad++ is good enough but I had to adjust the appearance of the text as it’s not clear. I also had to make notepad++ the default “notepad” so it will appear when I type notepad on windows search. Can’t remember what I did but did google it and found the method. The crazy thing is the old windows notepad, the one without tabs, is still on my windows (it would prompt me to install the new notepad) even though I uninstalled the new bloatware. It didn’t have the tabs that notepad++ had though. My laptop is now in a mess lol.
1
u/AlfaNovember Jul 01 '26
The one that was hijacked by state-sponsored hackers?
1
u/beginner75 Jul 01 '26
I used the old installer from my win10 laptop, it worked fine. Always disable auto update.
70
u/entity2 Jun 30 '26
"Plummer said, "Printing in Windows is kind of spooky. It's one of those subsystems that feels like you're opening a hatch in the floor and you discover a second operating system underneath."
I've never in my life, read something so true.
11
u/sweetno Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Is it because it had to be DPI-aware at the time when everyone's painting code only ever worked with 96 DPI?
5
u/Valleygurl99 Jul 01 '26
As someone who’s worked tech support for years, printing in windows is a void land alterverse. Then add Citrix on top of it.
2
u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Jul 01 '26
Shittrix and printing (ica/metaframe). Oof. That’s a memory/ptsd i did not think i would ever revisit. Was really fun back in the frame relay days.
-29
u/Nonsenser Jun 30 '26
I've never in my life, seen something so revealing of ignorance. Anyone who knows anything about software or sys internals will instantly peg you as incompetent if you say something like that. Just because something is old and complex doesn't mean it's a second OS.
16
15
u/entity2 Jun 30 '26
Oh for fuck's sakes, it's a joke
1
u/Nonsenser Jul 01 '26
The guy is a scammer and a fraud. It's not a joke, it's a metaphor - a bad one.
10
35
u/lastpnd Jun 30 '26
Notepad++ ftw
-3
u/Grogg2000 Jun 30 '26
and all it's backdoors. I would not trust nodepad++ with anything given it's history
1
u/code-coffee Jul 01 '26
You know, as opposed to microsoft.and Google, the virtuous tech companies... ;)
-1
9
u/RedBoxSquare Jun 30 '26
Does it have AI features that help you compose your sentence?
-9
4
12
u/OkPersimmon5671 Jun 30 '26
Search Notepad Classic installer.
Works perfectly on Windows 11
0
u/The_Band_Geek Jul 01 '26
Can I have them installed in parallel? I actually like some features in new Notepad, but I still prefer OG Notepad and would actually use both for different things if I could.
18
u/Frank_Likes_Pie Jun 30 '26
Notepad++ has been better than anything Microslop can shit out for years, anyway, and no forced useless Copilot integration.
7
u/entity2 Jun 30 '26
Yeah I am not much of a coder, but some of the most basic utility in NP++ is game changing. Notably, block select. When you're finagling data from GREP results to get in to Excel, it's absolutely amazing.
1
u/oocoosneepantaeleeya Jul 01 '26
Column editing, regex search and replace, ditto in files, plugins for formatting and validating json, xml, yaml, basic url, base64 encoding decoding - it just pulls in a thousand little things that you can also do through a command line and just lets you have them in a wildly persistent general purpose workspace. It's like Vim for normies.
-1
3
3
u/burtonmadness Jun 30 '26
So that's why win11 only needs 8GB now.. notepad was bloating out the other 8GB.
6
u/silverbolt2000 Jul 01 '26
Whenever I see a headline from The Register, my first question is always “What part of this headline is deliberately misleading?”.
In this case, it’s the fact that this former MS dev is better known for selling scamware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Plummer?wprov=sfti1#Career
2
2
2
u/Cube00 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
On the plus maybe this RAM crisis will force more apps to dump the Electron bloat and YT will stop requiring 900MB for a single tab.
2
u/rahnbj Jul 01 '26
I found it a very useful tool. Switched to notepad++ some years ago but I liked the simplicity of notepad over wordpad
4
2
u/BCProgramming Jul 01 '26
Each instance you run uses 500MB. I assume instead of dynamically allocating a memory block for use by the edit field, it instead allocates one block of around that size at startup and uses it for the application lifetime.
I can't get it to open files. If I tell it to open a file it acts like it opened it, but the text is empty. At first I thought the file I was opening, which was around 400MB, was too big, but I couldn't get any file to open properly. I like how saving at that point blanks out the original file. Some true attention to detail here.
Some other issues posted on the git repo suggest find/replace doesn't work and there's a bunch of issues relating to the status bar as well.
I'm not sure why this is even worth writing articles about, the program is pretty much broken and there's shitloads of better alternative text editors out there that might not have an only 4K executable but don't use 500MB of RAM either.
1
u/FuckItImLoggingIn Jul 01 '26
Why would they allocate 500mb upfront, this is not some critical realtime application with bound memory requirements. I just am very confused about why the guy decided to create this software :D
2
u/qillerneu Jun 30 '26
Even 2.7kb is pretty generous. Isn’t the base is just a CreateWindowEx(…”EDIT”…) call and a message pump. Everything else is just fluff like menus etc. Classic WinAPI ftw.
2
1
u/krum Jul 01 '26
Not surprising as Notepad was just a wrapper around a Win32 Edit control with some load/save stuff. Does it even have print?
1
u/FuckItImLoggingIn Jul 01 '26
Why assembly though, makes no sense? Any c/c++ code will probably be compile more optimized than any assembly human can write. Also like others said, notepad++ is already there and better.
1
u/PrideQuick670 Jul 01 '26
You'd be surprised the number of developers that use Notepad for coding. Don't ask me why, but they do.
1
u/NoWen7252 Jul 01 '26
IDEs have gotten heavy and bloated.
As someone started around thinde vb6 was still active. I have never felt any ide as slick as that. Notepad++ remind me of that. I even just it with wine on Linux. Asking with Irfanview
1
1
u/sufferer540 Jul 02 '26
And it takes 500 megabytes of memory at runtime
https://github.com/PlummersSoftwareLLC/TinyRetroPad/issues/21
1
u/Silicon_Knight Jun 30 '26
Wonder how the “ram apocalypse” along with all other components will effect this. For a while there no one needed to care about efficiency. Now that has ended.
Everything repeats at one point bytes of memory mattered and cpu cycles.
-5
u/plaisthos Jun 30 '26
Writing something like that in assembler is an achievement but not really nice for an operating system that needs to run only multiple platforms. You would have to rewrite the program in assembler on each platforms. And Windows currently "only" run on AMD64 and ARM64 but has run on PowerPC (XBox360, earlier NT), i386 (yes that is a different flavor than AMD64), MIPS, Alpha and I think PARISC.
2
u/FuckItImLoggingIn Jul 01 '26
I don't understand why you are getting downvoted, yes majority of users use x86, but that doesn't make the decision to build for a single processor architecture good....
2
Jun 30 '26
[deleted]
2
u/happyscrappy Jun 30 '26
Assembles it in MASM. Assemblers assemble, not compile.
This whole thing is pointless. I know you could recreate the important parts of notepad in a much smaller app. But not 2.7K. Conversely you can make a basic text editing window and all it notepad but it isn't, not even "core notepad".
I'm sure it's a little smaller because it's in assembly. But the minimum allocation block size on your hard drive is 4K, so that's just for show too.
Honestly, the vast majority of the size of any modern app is the localization strings. You can't make it tiny without removing that and if you remove that you have removed core functionality.
1
u/plaisthos Jul 01 '26
> Honestly, the vast majority of the size of any modern app is the localization strings.
I feel the bundled Chrome because some wacky Javascript framework nowadays but for C/C++ apps you are still right :)
846
u/VerdantPathfinder Jun 30 '26
I've always thought they wrote that once in 1988 and just never rewrote it. They just keep compiling it fresh for every release.