Ex-Microsoft legend, Dave's Garage
Dave Plummer
Profile
Dave Plummer is the retired Microsoft engineer who wrote the original Windows Task Manager at his kitchen table in the mid-90s, walked the demo into Dave Cutler’s office, and had it shipped in Windows NT. He’s also the guy who ported Space Cadet Pinball to Windows NT, built the Zip/Unzip support in Windows Explorer, and did time on MS-DOS 6.2. He left Microsoft in 2003, ran a software company of his own, and these days is most visible as the host of Dave’s Garage — a YouTube channel north of a million subscribers that blends tech history, operating-system internals, benchmarking wars, and a rapidly growing slice of AI content.
What makes him worth paying attention to right now isn’t nostalgia. It’s the angle. Plummer is a systems guy — he thinks in threads, schedulers, memory layouts, paper tapes — and he’s been bringing that lens to modern AI in a way almost no one else on YouTube does. His most talked-about recent project trained a single-layer transformer on a 1979 PDP-11/44 with 64KB of RAM, using the ATTN-11 assembly code. The model hits 100% accuracy on a sequence-reversal task after ~350 training steps in about three and a half minutes. The point isn’t the stunt — it’s his argument that transformers aren’t mystical, just mechanical arithmetic scaled up absurdly.
He also does a steady stream of practical AI videos: side-by-side tests of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok; explorations of AI-generated code; commentary on where LLMs shine and where they fall over. He’s open about being autistic (he’s written two books about it) and credits that wiring for the obsessive pattern-matching that makes both low-level systems work and reverse-engineering LLM behavior come naturally.
For a father who grew up on assembly and a son studying AI theory at university, Plummer sits at exactly the right intersection: a veteran who built the software you’ve been running for thirty years, now explaining modern AI without the hype, from the bottom up.
Books
Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire Plummer's memoir and field guide on building a career and a life on the autism spectrum, drawing on his Microsoft years and what came after.Key Articles & Papers
Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories (Lex Fridman Podcast #479) Microsoft's Task Manager turns 30: Original coder celebrates Veteran Windows dev shows off AI running on 47-year-old PDP-11 davepl on GitHubSpotify Podcasts
