August 24th, 2018

The Windows 95 team were proud slackers

During one of the many (many) team meetings during the course of Windows 95, there was a slide that showed something-or-other broken down by job discipline. There was a column for developers, another for quality assurance, and a third column labeled Slackers.

The presenter was one of the lead program managers and explained that the Slackers column represented program managers and other management overhead. (This is the same person who famously predicted that the project would ship by June 1993, “Otherwise, I’ll be applying for a job at McDonalds.”)

As I’ve noted a few times before, the Windows 95 team enjoyed self-deprecating humor, and it wasn’t long before the epithet Slacker was adopted through the entire team.

We even had shirts made.

Windows 95 released to manufacturing on this day 23 years ago.

Topics
History

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion are closed.