Father of Windows Task Manager Reveals Embarrassing "Social Death" Operation: Once Wrote Phone Number into Code
When people talk about programming stories from the past, Dave Plummer is a name that cannot be avoided. As the creator of the native Windows Task Manager, he built this system tool for Microsoft in the 1990s, which is still relied upon by countless users today. However, little known is that the programmer once accidentally left his home phone number in the software's code.
The story began with a seemingly impossible error: Plummer discovered while developing Task Manager that CPU usage sometimes added up to more than 100%—"If calculated correctly, this simply shouldn't happen."
After confirming that his code was correct, the only possibility was a bug at the kernel level, as the Task Manager's data was drawn from the kernel. However, in Microsoft's internal "hierarchy" in the 1990s, it wasn't easy to get kernel developers to take this seriously. "The kernel was the domain of 'genius elites'," Plummer recalled, "and I was just a UI programmer who drew small CPU icons. It goes without saying that when I suggested to the kernel team that 'maybe it's your bug,' they showed no sympathy for my situation."
To locate this rarely reproducible problem, Plummer added an assertion to the code, stipulating that CPU usage should not exceed 100%. If the condition was not met, the program would throw an error and stop in the debugger, allowing the problem to be checked.
However, this bug was extremely rare—"It never triggered on my machine or on the machines of anyone on my team." So Plummer came up with a "most likely way to catch the problem": "I wrote my name and home phone number into the assertion. That way, no matter who in the company, when, where, or in which building encountered the problem, they would see my contact information and then tell me."
Plummer quickly forgot about this "Easter egg" he had buried. Then, the Windows beta was officially released—with a user base of at least thousands, possibly millions. All these testers' computers contained a string of code: if an error occurred, a dialog box displaying his home phone number would pop up.
Surprisingly, despite Plummer still using the same home number, no one has ever called. As for the bug that caused CPU usage to exceed 100%, it was eventually caught on a lab machine, and the kernel developers confirmed that the problem was indeed on their side and fixed it.