A former Microsoft veteran engineer who had worked on multiple major Windows components and features recently shared a story relating to Zip support. Today, more back story about it was shared.
Former Microsoft engineer and Task Manager creator Dave Plummer added ZIP file support to Windows, but initially through his own independently-sold kernel extension, VisualZIP.
These days, we take Windows built-in zip support for granted, even if we prefer to use an alternative tool like 7-Zip. The story of how Microsoft added zip functionality to its operating system is an interesting one, and the guy responsible for it reveals how its creation nearly got him fired from his job at the tech giant.
More than 30 years before the xz backdoor became the near disaster of the week, an intern tried to sneak some unexpected code into MS-DOS. Not a backdoor, but…