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Subscribe to our newsletter Task Manager is a piece of software you almost only have to open up when something is going wrong, and its creator, Dave Plummer, knows this well.

As detailed in their latest YouTube Video, "If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies."He elaborates, "It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp.

It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not." Plummer says that the software came in at under 80 kB when he originally wrote it and that it was "insanely fast".Plummer details working on 1 MHz Commodore 64 games and how that experience trained them to think about programs in specific ways.

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He says, "Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that.

Every line has a cost.

Every allocation leaves footprints ## Editor's Note Stay tuned for more updates as this story develops. Source: [PC Gamer](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/task-managers-creator-says-it-used-to-be-50-times-smaller-because-in-that-time-and-place-small-was-fast-and-fast-mattered/)