I figured I’d start off with an old war story. A REALLY old story. From back in the Windows 1.0 days. One that could never ever happen these days.

It’s about 2 months before Windows 1.0 is about to ship (so it’s sometime around August/September 1985). Microsoft had announced Windows 18 months before this point, and we were getting HAMMERED in the press about vapor ware. So the team was under a HUGE amount of pressure to ship windows as fast as humanly possible with the maximum feature set.

Anyway, as I said, it’s about 2 months before ship time. And the developer responsible for the windows memory manager comes in on Monday morning and announces to the team that he’s just checked in a new version of the memory manager that supports swapping movable data segments to disk (up until that point Windows had the ability to discard code segments and reload them but no ability to reload data).

Steve Ballmer, who was the development lead for the project at that point’s only comment was, “Ok, I want to fire the SOB. I REALLY want to fire the SOB, but we need this feature”.