Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu • The Register
Remember when the Windows Start Menu was a pure thing, unsullied by ads and decades of tinkering? Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has shared his role in bringing an iconic piece of Windows 95 into the world of Windows NT.
While some might consider that Microsoft lost its way when it ditched Program Manager for the Windows 95 Start Menu, that early iteration represented a far more innocent world compared to what pops up when the Windows key is pressed in Windows 11.
Plummer, who worked on familiar parts of the Windows experience, such as Task Manager, had a hand in porting the Start Menu from Windows 95 to Windows NT, with responsibility for what is painted on the screen when the menu pops up and running the selected program at end.
Naturally, Plummer is keen to give the lion’s share of the credit for the Start Menu to the Windows 95 design team, but shared the tricks used to make the product name – Windows NT, 2000 Professional or whatever – turn up sideways on the menu without requiring a library of localized bitmaps: “You couldn’t at that time draw sideways text,” Plummer explained, “and you certainly couldn’t in Windows 95.”
“But could you do it on Windows NT? Well, not directly, but Windows NT provided something called Coordinate Transformations that allowed you to do things like rotate the entire device context. If you did that by 90 degrees and gave it the right Coordinate Transformations then you could magically draw into it and it would render it directly up.”
Which is how the product name appeared.
Plummer also spoke of the pain of moving from the NetBEUI networking stack of Windows 95 to the TCP/IP preferred by Windows NT. While the NetBEUI on Windows 95 had an instant time-out if the user misspelled a server name, things were different on NT where TCP/IP might spend 90 seconds waiting on a DNS query. Plummer was tasked with rewriting that part of the Start Menu to run asynchronously, so that the system would remain responsive while the networking stack waited to be told there was no such server.
With credit to another Microsoft veteran, Raymond Chen, Plummer went on to explain an unfortunate side-effect of the asynchronous code. If you got the server right, but got the share name wrong, and kept on typing when entering the wrong share name, there would be a good chance that the server would decide it had received too many invalid requests and lock out the user.
“That was something we fixed well before ship,” Plummer said, “but it was something we ran into internally once we had added this functionality.”
Decades on, it is easy to be caught out by the consequences of asynchronous operation. However, the hack used – if it can be called that – to persuade the product name to appear sideways on the Start Menu in the name of efficiency is a delight.
It is also a reminder of how far Microsoft has not come in its development of that key part of the Windows experience: the Start Menu. ®