In the hospital, a nurse's cart is filled with medical supplies and medications that could save your life, but Microsoft had one of those carts back in the day, and its arrival usually meant test PCs were in trouble. Developers within the company called it the "Cart of Death" - a repurposed cart loaded with various USB devices and three hubs used to test plug-and-play support for Windows PCs.
In a recent chat with Dave Plummer on Dave's Garage, Raymond Chen, a 30-year Windows veteran, recalled the early days of USB and the testing (and shenanigans) surrounding the Death Wagon. This device is an old-fashioned cart that you might find in any corporate mailroom, if those mailrooms still exist.
The "death car" doesn't carry mail, but instead carries three daisy-chained USB hubs and connects at least 60 other devices. Chen recalled that it had at least three different mouse models plugged into it, four keyboards, a USB printer and various other peripherals (pictured below), filled with every USB device they could get their hands on.
The humor is that the car is heavy and clunky, so they used a USB gaming steering wheel to give it direction.
These different devices are connected in series through a daisy chain hub. As programmers perfect the code for each driver, someone comes along with a "car of death" to ruin their good work. All the devices on the cart will only be plugged into one USB plug at the same time, and while this is happening Windows will be frantically trying to recognize and install all of them at the same time.
Once the USB infrastructure is stable and all drivers are installed, the Death Wagon crew can try out each device to see if they work without errors.
Developers also watch as the Plug and Play system enumerates devices and begins loading drivers for them while unplugging.
As one would expect, interrupting the process like this usually results in a blue screen of death, which is where the car gets its name. Of course, Windows kernel programmers don't like this, because it means they have to recheck their "perfect" code and add error handlers and other tweaks.
Chen mentioned a debugging laboratory where various test machines are lined up on a table. Sometimes the cart driver will go in at night and plug the death cart into every computer and maybe run it for 5 seconds on one computer, 7 seconds on another computer, and 7 seconds on another computer with a different BSOD. Then the programmers would arrive on site in the morning and find a bunch of problems they needed to solve.
DavePlummer is also no stranger to Windows. Starting in 1993, he worked at Microsoft for 10 years, helping to develop MS-DOS. After establishing himself in Windows, Plummer developed various applications, including the Windows Task Manager. Plummer is now semi-retired—if running a YouTube channel in between college lectures counts as semi-retired—but his resume, coupled with Chen's, made for an interesting interview between two Windows experts.