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See Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT by Zachary. Gives you an idea what the Unix landscape was like, and how primitive Windows was when Da
by twistedpair 10y ago
See Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT by Zachary. Gives you an idea what the Unix landscape was like, and how primitive Windows was when Dave Culter's team from Digital began building NT (after the VMS at Digital), which became Windows XP (when Windows stopped crashing every hour).
Much of what we assume every OS does today was cutting edge development in 1990.
- throwanem 10y agoNitpick: NT became Windows 2000, and that's where Windows stopped crashing every hour. XP came next, and was where the 2000/NT line entirely superseded the 95/98/Me line, whereupon there was much rejoicing.
- chubot 10y agoYeah everyone seems to rag on C for being ancient. They don't realize that, in 1990, writing a kernel in C was an huge improvement over assembly language! And it still is today -- there's really no other option. If your only other choice is assembly language, then C starts to look really good. You don't complain about weird function interfaces, because at least you have functions!
- twistedpair 10y agoThe original NT graphics code was in newfangled C++. The books goes into detail on the time lost teaching the team C++, and that they should have stuck with C. ;)