# Ep.9 Larry Osterman: on working at Microsoft for over 37 years from MS-DOS to Azure and advice on how to have a long and productive career at the company JUNE 6TH, 2022 | 01:40:31 | E9 [Play](https://jlampodcast.z19.web.core.windows.net/episodes/009-larry-osterman.mp3) ### EPISODE SUMMARY Larry Osterman is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, and he's been here for over 37 years! In a career that starts with MS-DOS and continues today with Azure, Larry has seen it all and shares not only his stories, but the accumulated wisdom he has gained in his distinguished career. ### EPISODE NOTES ## Links to sections (with timestamps) - Larry's been here for 37 years 10 months ... or has he? 01:53 - Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s: 03:04 - Interviewing for a small 500 person startup in Seattle: 06:01 - Meeting Steve Ballmer, "Head of HR": 08:23 - Interviewing with Gordon Letwin: 10:50 - Flying to Paris to fix a floppy drive bug in MS DOS 4.0: 13:33 - Burgermaster for lunch and naming objects in MS DOS: 16:58 - Documenting the creation of Windows NT: Greg Zachary and Helen Custer: 19:35 - On the importance of lunch conversations in driving the culture of a team: 23:30 - It's Alive! Windows NT running Reversi on an i860 emulator: 28:04 - Thursday Beers, MAPI Beers and the Weekly World News: 30:08 - Rewriting the Beep() API in Windows Vista to save tens of millions of dollars: 34:22 - Larry's brief tenur in Microsoft Research: 43:14 - The legendary Exchange Server "Stonehenge Party": 49:03 - Scalability Day and Microsoft's beginnings as an enterprise software company: 55:26 - How Larry's biggest feature in Windows 7 kept killing gamers in-game: 01:04:44 - The origins of the Windows Runtime team in Windows 8: 01:07:09 - The origin story of the IUnknown.com domain name: 01:11:26 - How Larry enabled language projections in WinRT using COM: 01:12:34 - From Windows to Azure: Confidential Compute and encrypted VMs: 01:20:13 - On joining DevDiv and the Azure SDK team and becoming "mini-Jeff": 01:27;17 - What advice would you give someone just starting their career at Microsoft? 01:32:28 - Something that gave Larry an outsized amount of joy recently: 01:37:21 ## External Links - [Larry's Glowforge](https://glowforge.com/) - [Larry's ornate box, cut on the Glowforge](https://twitter.com/osterman/status/1512889420155826176) - The [Goupil G4](https://www.old-computers.com/Museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=537) with the showstopper floppy drive bug - [Gordon Letwin](https://wiki.c2.com/?GordonLetwin) - [Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary](https://amzn.to/3Q5vbbE) - [Inside Windows NT by Helen Custer](https://amzn.to/3MiB1mL) - [PC Roadkill by Michael Hyman](https://amzn.to/3Q1ANDC) ## Music credits –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release] Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: [https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4](https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4) Free Download / Stream: [https://alplus.io/lost-medina](https://alplus.io/lost-medina) ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––