"""
If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies.
It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not.
Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent.
I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now.
Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight.
"""
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/task-managers-creat...
Honestly this headline reeks of social media clickbait
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
My first attempt at coding was … unsuccessful.
The Challenge: Can we build Notepad in 3K in assembly language?
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
Don't get me wrong, it's hundreds of times better than whatever UWP abomination they call Notepad in Windows 11 nowadays (with logins and AI features), but it's not an actual text viewer / editor from scratch.
Mr. Plummer seems to be really good at semi-sensational and click-baity marketing. I want to watch his videos because I like the subject matter but I can't stomach the spin.
The crazy part is that my strategy actually worked on a single MOSFET transistor, which only has three pins. I just assumed it would scale up on computer chip with tens to hundreds of thousands of MOSFETS and a few dozen pins. Also, if my first test had been on a BJT transistor, instead of a MOSFET, I would have destroyed it.
> And today, we're going to answer the obvious question, which is not merely, "How is that possible?" The more interesting question is: "What does Windows already contain that lets a program that small behave like a real application?" Because the answer is hiding in plain sight, and it says something surprisingly important about native software, operating systems design, and why modern applications sometimes feel like they arrive towing a circus caravan.
> Suddenly, it wasn't just a stunt anymore; it was the beginning of something that could actually behave like actual software.
> A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city.
> And by the time the app even opens a blank document, it already has the gravitational field of a minor planet.
Those punchy comparisons, "not just" sentences are really a big tell of it being an AI-written script. I think a lot of people get fooled when YouTubers read AI-written text themselves, since you see it as a person talking, not as a pure text.
Some very ironic (unaware) comments from the video:
> It's so amazing to see this type of content in the era of AI slop where every app is just an Electron wrapper fighting for RAM with the other Electron wrappers. My favourite line from this "The OS is not just a bootloader for your browser and other apps, it's a giant library"
> Hey Dave, love all your videos, I'm curious how you manage not to fall into surrendering all your mental capacity to AI and what do you think of AI?
And other people noticing AI:
> Is it just me or does it feel like the script for the video was written by AI?
> I personally don’t like the style of narration used in this video, reminds me too much of AI generated fluff
> is it me or do daves scripts feel AI generated
> Is it just me or the whole script sounds like AI? It's not just x is, the comment about a compression goblin一 God, I have AI psychosis
> Why the AI text. You're a good storyteller.
> Dave, please tell me you are not using AI for your scripts... Your "it's not ____, it's ____", is making me worry
But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)
> UWP abomination they call Notepad
Kind of weird for both of those things to be true. I thought the latter was mostly the former. But I’ve been away from Windows for a loooooong time it seems.
Dave Plummer started his programmer's career at Microsoft back in the MS-DOS days. He knows a thing or two about code optimization, which is why he is now trying to strip Notepad of the unwanted AI shovelware Microsoft has been adding over the past few years.
Plummer is the man who claims to have created some major Windows features, including the original Task Manager application. Now, the YouTuber and retired developer shared his latest creation: a text editor named TinyRetroPad, which is designed to mimic Notepad's text editing functionality while staying as small as possible on disk.
TinyRetroPad is a Notepad-style text editor contained in roughly 2.5 kilobytes (KB). One kilobyte traditionally refers to 1,024 bytes, which means the new editor is definitely using a lot of optimization tricks to contain a usable application inside such a tiny package. Plummer forked TinyRetroPad from Dave's Tiny Editor, which was previously forked from the coder's HelloAssembly project (tiny.asm).
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Tiny.asm was designed to be the smallest possible Windows application, and TinyRetroPad is certainly a very small text editor. The new project keeps the same minimalist, size-obsessed spirit while providing some "modern" features such as Notepad-style Menus. Needless to say, both projects are programmed in Assembly.
Plummer explained that TinyRetroPad is essentially a wrapper built around the "RICHEDIT50W" control provided by the Windows API. All further additions to tiny.asm were kept as "cheap" as possible, exploiting Crinkler's compression algorithm to reduce the program's size at build time. The final executable file should work, look, and "feel" like a classic Notepad application, while being 100 times smaller than the latest Notepad version included in Windows 11.

Plummer said that back in his Microsoft days, engineers knew pretty well that Notepad was for plain text editing while WordPad was for RTF editing jobs. It was an important difference, and coders were advised to never cross the streams. Meanwhile, today's Notepad is often being used by Microsoft as a guinea pig for testing unnecessary features, including generative AI and image embedding.
Plummer is not a fan of the modern Notepad, so he decided to rebuild the tool from scratch by creating TinyRetroPad. The new editor should resemble the Notepad version included in Windows XP, with no unnecessary features and absolutely no AI whatsoever.
Plummer is credited with making some significant contributions to Microsoft software products, and coding some minor annoyances as well. After retiring from the company, the coder founded his own venture named SoftwareOnline. The firm made money by selling software products with questionable value, and was later sued by the Washington State Attorney General's Office for violating the Consumer Protection Act.
The best software is the software that does one thing and does it well.
Available Now
Preview links without opening tabs. Available on Edge and Firefox. Chrome support coming soon.
Google Chrome Soon
Coming to the Chrome Web Store