This is how Windows NT got its beloved start menu
Former Microsoft developer Dave W. Plummer is always entertaining with his anecdotes. Now he has reported how, with astonishingly little effort and a newly discovered trick, he once ensured that Windows NT, with the start menu he programmed, was loved by many users. WinFuture.de
Mr Plummer reveals secrets
Dave Plummer has on X/Twitter once again published a story from his time at Microsoft in which he described how he once made sure that Windows NT got a newly programmed start menu. Instead of the bitmap image files used in Windows 95, he wanted programming code to be used in Windows NT 4.0 to display the start menu in all its details.
Windows NT came in a variety of variants and languages, so bitmaps couldn’t be used to display the operating system name to the left of the normal Start menu entries, the developer explained in his post. Plummer set out to find a method to program the graphic design in the Start menu with the vertical text with the operating system name and the color gradient. Plummer first discovered that it was not possible to render text vertically rotated under Windows NT, but he was able to achieve this by “rotating the device context.” In the end, he was able to display the product name in the Start menu without much effort.
Simple tricks without the involvement of designers
Using simple “GDI calls”, i.e. requests to the rendering system of the old Windows versions, it was also possible to change the color behind the font from blue to black in just a few steps. Plummer says that this design was based on the image of a sky that fades into a black surface that was also used on the Windows NT packaging. According to Plummer’s recollection, no graphic designer was involved in the design of the Windows NT start menu. Of course, the designers had previously decided what the Windows 95 start menu should look like, which Plummer used as a guide for NT, but in this case the design team had no influence on the workstation and server operating system itself.
Ultimately, Plummer’s work ensured that the Windows NT start menu, and therefore also Windows 2000, could be displayed with a level of performance rarely achieved. There were apparently no long decision-making processes at Microsoft back then: the task had to be done and he simply decided one day to take it on and implement it, said the former Microsoft employee. For me, Windows NT and later Windows 2000 were the preferred choice for many years, as they were generally more stable and were often less visually overloaded and “playful” than Windows 95, 98 and XP. Did you tend to use the consumer versions or were you more at home in the “workstation” world of NT.
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