No matter how smart you are, there’s always room for a little childish fun. Or an ominous threat to your rivals, one of the two. Ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer interviewed the chief architect and designer of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, on his YouTube channel back in 2023, and I’ve just got around to the highlights after he reshared it on X.
By highlights I mean, the juicy stuff. Plummer kicks off asking Cutler about a “legend” regarding a gift sent to competing Sun Microsystems around the launch of Windows NT, and he was only too happy to provide the details.
“We decided that [Sun Microsystems co-founder] Scott McNealy was kind of mealy-mouthed, and there were some other people around that were a little bit that way too,” said Cutler, directly referencing Lee Reiswig at IBM. “Somebody, and I don’t know who it was… found these black cardboard coffins, and they were about two feet long.”
“So we decided that we would send Scott McNealy and Lee Reiswig a coffin, and we would put a special message in it,” Cutler continued. “We found a birthday card that played the Death March… so we sent one of these to Lee Reiswig, and we sent one to Scott McNealy.” So far, so oddly macabre. However, the fun didn’t stop there: