Among former Microsoft software engineers, he is certainly one of the best known Dave Plummer. The programmer and entrepreneur revealed in 2020 that he is the inventor of the Windows Task Manager, one of the most universally used system applications for diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes.
Plummer, however, is also responsible for introducing support for the Zip format in the Microsoft operating system. Today there are many ways to zip a folder in Windows but once upon a time it was necessary to rely on historical ones compression utilityeven though Zip was an open format.
How support for the Zip format came into Windows
The functionality Compressed folders was introduced with the Windows 98 Plus package! and then be confirmed in Windows Me and subsequent operating systems.
At the time (it was 1993), Plummer says, the engineer was working on COM (Component Object Model), a Microsoft technology that provides a model for creating reusable and interoperable software components.
At home, and for fun, Plummer began writing ashell extension to manage the contents of Zip archives compressed with the Windows 95 interface. The goal was to make the contents of Zip files appear like normal folders. The project quickly grew into a named shareware product VisualZIP.
Suddenly, Plummer was contacted by a Microsoft employee tasked with tracing the author of that VisualZIP, which had so impressed the company’s top management. In reality, after some initial misunderstandings, it emerged that the engineer already worked for the Redmond company. Company which at that point offered him an economic compensation to acquire the code of VisualZIP and integrate it into Windows.
“Next time you open a Zip file on Windows think about my Corvette LT1“, says Plummer. Yes, because with the sum offered to him at the time by Microsoft for his VisualZIP, the engineer bought that car (used). It also shows the photo with a message about.
Plummer explains why Zip support in Windows is still slow today
The former Microsoft developer doesn’t mince his words and notes that the Zip support remains, even today, rather slow in Windows. This is because the code used by the Redmond company’s operating system is the same as over 25 years ago and is single-threaded. It doesn’t matter how many CPU cores you have: the Zip file management he only ever uses one.
The code also first extracts the Zip archive files to a temporary location, provides that location to the shell, and then the shell copies the file to the destination indicated by the user. In short, each activity on compressed archives involves an additional temporary copy operation.
“These are aspects that could be fixed“, conclude Plummer. “But I imagine anyone who routinely uses compressed file formats will likely continue to turn to utilities like 7-Zip and WinRAR“.
The engineer adds that with Windows 11 support has been added for other compressed formats, including 7-Zip and RAR (but also tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.zst, tar.xz, tgz, tbz2, tzst and txz): there is therefore Microsoft’s desire to optimize the management of these types of archives.