Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Making software feel snappier when you only have 12 MB RAM

People of a certain age sometimes like to reminisce about how software in the old days was somehow more responsive and more efficient on far less powerful hardware. Microsoft's approach was to take its software binaries and optimize the heck out of them.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer spilled the beans on the practice, confirming that the company used an internal application called Basic Block Tool (BBT) – known internally as Microsoft Lego – to shuffle the internals of binaries to speed execution.

Plummer's recollections go back to the '90s, when his first NT development system ran on a paltry 12 MB of RAM, but software was relentlessly growing in size. A binary might have 10 MB of code, but the startup path only needed 300 KB of it.

"But if those 300 KB are sprinkled like Parmesan across...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE