Task Manager's creator says it used to be 50 times smaller because 'in that time and place, small was fast and fast mattered'

Task Manager is a piece of software you almost only have to open up when something is going wrong, and its creator, Dave Plummer, knows this well. As detailed in their latest YouTube Video, "If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies."

He elaborates, "It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not." Plummer says that the software came in at under 80 kB when he originally wrote it and that it was "insanely fast".

Plummer details working on 1 MHz Commodore 64 games and how that experience trained them to think about programs in specific ways. He says, "Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent."

The Microsoft vet notes that Task Manager is now around 4 megabytes, which is around 50 times bigger. Naturally, Task Manager no longer needs to be as small as it originally was, given how much computers have progressed since Task Manager's launch three decades ago.

Plummer states, "I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now." Task Manager was only reportedly so small purely because "in that time and place, small was fast and fast mattered."

The Windows stalwart describes that the first thing Task Manager does is communicate with other instances of Task Manager, and investigates them. Instead of simply seeing if it's running, it communicates to the program and shuts it down if it doesn't get a reply.

It also only enabled and worked with part of its program if that was needed to run. Now, Plummer argues users "pay every cost upfront all the time for every user, whether or not they benefit. Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight"

Notably, Plummer reflects on how he has changed as a programmer and designer since making Task Manager. He says that one of Task Manager's unique features is that it replaces runtime startup code with something bespoke, to avoid the baggage that comes with operating like a standard bit of software. Plummer says, "It's the sort of thing you do when you're young enough to think that manually replacing the runtime startup code is a reasonable afternoon activity."

Plummer does, however, argue that Task Manager differs from many modern utilities in scope and intent. It's not just that modern programs are bigger, in Plummer's eyes, but that they often "lack the instinct for refusal. They don't ask 'does the user benefit from this work right now?', they ask, 'can the hardware do it?' and those are not the same question."

Admittedly, he does balance this, arguing not to romanticise the code, and he also acknowledges "there are definitely parts of the old Task Manager where I can see the younger Dave strutting around the office thinking he's a lot more clever than he really is".

The Task Manager creator left Microsoft in 2003, but he has spoken extensively about his work on Task Manager, coding Pinball on Windows NT, and has levied some complaints at the current state of Windows.

He also, back in February, showed off his AI dashboard with synthwave music, saying "this is probably what Task Manager would look like (and sound like) if I were still around", whilst admitting "it's a good thing I knew to stay in my lane, design-wise."