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How many computers does it take to make a Microsoft employee happy

  • 项目

Over the weekend, it seems like a mini-meme went through https://blogs.msdn.com, "How many computers does it take to make a Microsoft employee happy".

Normally I don't do meme's but enough people have asked this question privately that...

What machines do I have in my office today?

I currently have four computers with power cords connected to them - my dev machine (a 3ish GHz HP machine), and two test machines (one AMD64, one Dell 2ish GHz machine), and my laptop (an old Dell Lattitude C610).  I also have an old Dell that's currently taking up space in the corner in case I need a spare kernel debugger machine (I used to use it for Windows Media Connect testing).

Over the years, I've had as many as 8 computers in my office, typically I've got three (the AMD64 is mostly a loaner, for some AMD64-only work I'm doing).

As I mentioned, my highest number of computers was 8.  That was back when I was in Exchange and had to have an NT4 machine running Exchange 5.5, two machines running Exchange 2000, one development machine, one laptop, a prototype Itanium machine (which was kept powered off most of the time) and one other I don't remember).

When I started, I had three computers - a PC/XT, a Salmon (prototype PC/AT), a PCjr (which was turned off most of the time), and a Z19 terminal.  How times have changed.

It's a little bit weird - I've not debugged on the same machine I develop on for almost my entire career at Microsoft.  It's to the point that even when I COULD develop on my dev machine (when I was working on SCP) I didn't - I copied all the bits to my test machine and ran the tests on the dedicated test machine.  After all this time, I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable going back to working on the same machine as my source code.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    Larry, just curious, was that "Z19" terminal a Zenith, and was it hooked up to a corporate PDP/20 or something?

    My development life is similar same as yours -- multiple machines (Macs, though), separate test machine -- for similar reasons. I do usually debug simple applications on my dev machine, though.
  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    Currently, 4 for this non-Microsofty
    1. Development machine, 3-ish GHz, XP, dual-monitor
    2. Corporate/Test machine (Mail, Office, etc), 0.4 GHz NT4, Port 1 on the KVM
    3. Test Machine, 1.5-ish GHz, 2K/XP with lots of Ghost images, Port 2 on the KVM
    4. Test Machine, 0.2 GHz, 98, Port 3 on the KVM.

    Like you, I love remote debugging; I really have to think twice about running quick-and-dirty test apps on my development machine.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
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  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    And I have 5.

    One Celeron D 2.4G for development, one PIII 800 for testing. And since my job is mainly inhouse development, I got 3 servers for production environment. (2 running Windows, 1 running Linux - I write script programs for the Linux too) :)
  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2005
    Hi Larry,
    I happened over this post recently and it seemed like a good place for me to ask a question I had. Are Microsoft employees allowed to build their own computers, or do they have to purchase them from somewhere? And, are you given a budget, or do you say I need X amount of PCs and if it's justified you get them?

    Thanks
  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2005
    I'm sure you can part together your own computer, I know that one of our test leads recently did that. But that's a rare case, most of the time we order one of a number of standard kits.

    And each PC has to be separately justified, either by the developer asking for it, or their manager. Some teams have a rolling schedule where they order one new machine every three or four months and the developer with the oldest machine gets upgraded with the next available machine. It all depends on the group and the available hardware upgrade budget.