'Every Microsoft engineer got a stopwatch,' says Windows veteran about 1980s focus on speed

A former Windows division president, Steven Sinofsky, said Microsoft gave engineers stopwatches in the 1980s to time operations like boot, save, and compile.

He said from 1980 to 2000 much development work focused on managing clock time, disk, and RAM usage.

Sinofsky recalled adding a spinning line counter to VC++ 1.0 that slightly slowed compilation but improved perceived speed.

Microsoft recently published a blog post pledging performance, overhead, and reliability improvements for Windows components like Explorer and Windows Update.