The History of Sysinternals

The first Sysinternals utility I wrote, Ctrl2cap, was born of necessity. Before I started using Windows NT in 1995, I mostly used UNIX systems, which have keyboards that place the Ctrl key where the Caps Lock key is on standard PC keyboards. Rather than adapt to the new layout, I set out to learn about Windows NT device driver development and to write a driver that converts Caps Lock key presses into Ctrl key presses as they make their way from the keyboard into the Windows NT input system. Ctrl2cap is still posted on the Sysinternals site today, and I still use it on all my systems.

Ctrl2cap was the first of many tools I wrote to learn about the way Windows NT works under the hood while at the same time providing some useful functionality. The next tool I wrote, NTFSDOS, I developed with Bryce Cogswell. I had met Bryce in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, and we had written several academic papers together and worked on a startup project where we developed software for Windows 3.1. I pitched the idea of a tool that would allow users to retrieve data from an NTFS-formatted partition by using the ubiquitous DOS floppy. Bryce thought it would be a fun programming challenge, and we divided up the work and released the first version about a month late....