Ep.9 Larry Osterman: on working at Microsoft for over 37 years from MS-DOS to Azure and advice on how to have a long and productive career at the company

Links to sections (with timestamps)

• Larry's been here for 37 years 10 months ... or has he? 01:53
• Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s: 03:04
• Interviewing for a small 500 person startup in Seattle: 06:01
• Meeting Steve Ballmer, "Head of HR": 08:23
• Interviewing with Gordon Letwin: 10:50
• Flying to Paris to fix a floppy drive bug in MS DOS 4.0: 13:33
• Burgermaster for lunch and naming objects in MS DOS: 16:58
• Documenting the creation of Windows NT: Greg Zachary and Helen Custer: 19:35
• On the importance of lunch conversations in driving the culture of a team: 23:30
• It's Alive! Windows NT running Reversi on an i860 emulator: 28:04
• Thursday Beers, MAPI Beers and the Weekly World News: 30:08
• Rewriting the Beep() API in Windows Vista to save tens of millions of dollars: 34:22
• Larry's brief tenur in Microsoft Research: 43:14
• The legendary Exchange Server "Stonehenge Party": 49:03
• Scalability Day and Microsoft's beginnings as an enterprise software company: 55:26
• How Larry's biggest feature in Windows 7 kept killing gamers in-game: 01:04:44
• The origins of the Windows Runtime team in Windows 8: 01:07:09
• The origin story of the IUnknown.com domain name: 01:11:26
• How Larry enabled language projections in WinRT using COM: 01:12:34
• From Windows to Azure: Confidential Compute and encrypted VMs: 01:20:13
• On joining DevDiv and the Azure SDK team and becoming "mini-Jeff": 01:27;17
• What advice would you give someone just starting their career at Microsoft? 01:32:28
• Something that gave Larry an outsized amount of joy recently: 01:37:21

External Links

• Larry's Glowforge
• Larry's ornate box, cut on the Glowforge
• The Goupil G4 with the showstopper floppy drive bug
• Gordon Letwin
• Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary
• Inside Windows NT by Helen Custer
• PC Roadkill by Michael Hyman

Music credits

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Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
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