Eric Engstrom, co-creator of DirectX, has died
I&#x27;ve known Eric since around 1985 or so when he came to work at Data I&#x2F;O. Our friendship has ebbed and flowed over the years, but he&#x27;s always been special to me.<p>I have a little anecdote to share that probably only I remember now, but it has always made me laugh and shows what an unusual thinker he was.<p>When he was first working at Microsoft around 1991 or 92, he was talking to a manager who had a problem. There was a program written in assembler language, about 50k in size or so. The program had a problem that needed to be fixed. The author no longer worked at Microsoft. The manager had repeatedly assigned various programmers the task of fixing it, and they&#x27;d all given up after days of effort.<p>The trouble was the author had used the macro language that came with the assembler to invent his own quirky, weird, undocumented and thoroughly impenetrable language. None of the programmers could figure it out. He was lamenting that he&#x27;d have to assign a programmer to recreating it from scratch, which would take months and cost a lot of money.<p>Eric says &quot;I can fix it&quot;.<p>In 2 hours, he had it all fixed and checked back into the system.<p>The manager, astonished, asked: &quot;how did you figure out the author&#x27;s language?&quot;<p>Eric: &quot;I didn&#x27;t. I disassembled the binaries using Walter&#x27;s disassembler [a disassembler turns binary code back into source assembler code]. The problem was then obvious, I fixed it and checked the new source code back in!&quot;<p>Eric then laughed uproariously, and so did I. Nobody but Eric would have thought of that shortcut to solve the problem. If he couldn&#x27;t break through the wall, he&#x27;d go over it, under it, or around it. He was always like that.<p>I&#x27;ll miss him a lot.