Veteran Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB so it could run smoothly on 90s computers — original utility used a smart technique to determine whether it was the only running instance

Dave Plummer showing the original Windows Task Manager.

Dave Plummer, the engineer behind many of Windows iconic features like ZIP file support, shared how he built the Task Manager to be so efficient. According to his YouTube video, the current Windows Task Manager is about 4MB, but the original version that he built was just 80K. Plummer’s main concern when he built the Windows utility was that hardware during that time was so limited, and that the tool that was used to recover the PC after everything had failed still needs to feel crisp and responsive, even if everything else had hung.