The Cart of Death continued to wreak havoc on Microsoft's test labs. It's like, 'We want to make sure this doesn't happen again!'" "The Cart of Death may have been inspired by it maybe. "That predated the Cart of Death," said Chen. It is 25 years since an impossibly young Chris Capossela – now exec veep of the Consumer Business at Microsoft – lived through a beta of Windows 98 crashing live on stage in front of Bill Gates as he attempted to attach a USB scanner. The result was typically a blue screen of death on the operating system, hence the USB Cart of Death. More often than not, however, the cart driver would not be nice and would instead wait a few seconds before yanking out the cable as Windows was rolling out the welcome mat. A nice person might wait until the Windows USB subsystem finished welcoming its unexpected visitors before giving one of the mice a little jiggle to check things were working. The cart driver would inquire if the developer had a test machine available, plug in that single cable… and stand well back. The cart would be wheeled into the office of a kernel developer working on USB support, Chen said. Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs.Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past.Microsoft veteran on how he forged a badge to sneak into a Ballmer presentation.Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea."One of the USB devices," Chen said, "was a USB gaming steering wheel, which was attached to the front so you could actually drive this cart down the hallway." Those still bearing the scars of USB might refer to the technology as Plug and Pray, but we digress. Something taken for granted today, but not so much in the last century. Attach or detach a USB device, and the host operating system should handle it without requiring a reboot. It also – and this is key – allowed hot plug and play. Chen remembers the limit being 64 devices, although the USB standard can support, in theory, up to 127 devices.
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