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Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but

Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but was waysided by management so he jumped ship, and built the design he wanted to build at DEC (but never got management buy-in for) at Microsoft. All outlined in the book Show Stopper! THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT Also, if you took a peek at his wikipedia entry, the guy is behind almost every large MSFT OS related initiative in the last few decades: NT, Azure, XBox hypervisor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_to_Present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_to...

simonebrunozzi 8y ago
And if I remember correctly, NT's kernel was a microkernel. It seemed to be the best choice for the future, back then.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.
  - StillBored 8y ago
    I wish people would stop saying its a hybrid because of the graphics being moved into the kernel... That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty. NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

And if I remember correctly, NT's kernel was a microkernel. It seemed to be the best choice for the future, back then.

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.
- StillBored 8y ago
  I wish people would stop saying its a hybrid because of the graphics being moved into the kernel... That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty. NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).