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>The most amazing aspect of all this is that the core of Windows, its kernel, remains virtually unchanged on all these architectures and SKUs. Is that really s
by detuur 8y ago
>The most amazing aspect of all this is that the core of Windows, its kernel, remains virtually unchanged on all these architectures and SKUs.
Is that really such an exciting concept? Maybe I have a poor understanding, but I've been under the impression that nearly every competing kernel (Linux, Darwin, *BSD) is exactly like that. The only situation where I can imagine a slight departure is Solaris and its SPARC architecture, where SPARC had certain features to specifically to tie in with the kernel but I'm sure it still compiled to foreign architectures from the same codebase.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoWell it is an exciting concept but it isn't as you point out unique. It was fairly clear in the 80's and 90's there were two 'streams' of systems programmers, those who started at mainframes and mini-computers and were making things work on smaller and smaller versions of those machines, and those who started at the ROM monitor or DOS level type machine and made things work on larger and larger versions of those machines. It was stark how differently the two 'types' of people approached operating system problems. Windows "crossed over" from being more of a monitor type interface to being an executive interface with Windows NT at the hands of a former VAX software architect (which was firmly in the mainframe getting smaller path), and that cross over happened for the masses when Microsoft merged the NT kernel with the Window "old tech" kernel in Windows XP as I recall. By the time Windows 7 came around it was pretty much unified for life and has evolved since then. If all you knew were Microsoft OSes, then yes it is an amazing journey. If however you had already been experiencing systems like UNIX that ran on everything from mainframes to PDP-11/70's you would not have been quite so surprised.
- smacktoward 8y agoThat's the core irony of the PC revolution. PCs started out with the explicit goal of being something different than mainframes and minis. But when people started networking them together, the only way to keep them viable was to essentially turn them into mainframes and minis, just in different shaped boxes. So we've gotten to live through 20 years of PC vendors reinventing things that big-iron users had access to long ago.
- nine_k 8y agoOne interesting part was that it had to become 10x to 100x cheaper to become viable on the PC platform: FPU, MMU, hardware virtualization, vector processors (aka GPUs), etc. It was possible for quite some time thanks to the Moore law.
- scentoni 8y agoAnd VMs that IBM invented on mainframes. And containers that IBM invented on mainframes.
- pjmlp 8y agoIncluding bytecode as executable format, with various ways to convert it into actual machine code before execution.
- derefr 8y ago(The original idea behind) PCs continued to exist long after networking, in the form of video game consoles. A Gameboy Advance isn't all that different from an Apple II or an IBM-compatible PC running DOS: both focus on running one executable and giving it complete control over banging bits toward "rich" I/O devices, where instead of abstractions over ugly low-level interfaces, the peripherals have been designed with nice ABIs that are their canonical APIs (and, until the ARM era, the CPUs themselves were also designed such that their ISA, as written in macro-assembler, was the canonical "high-level" language.) Of course, eventually game consoles became networked too...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI think it was Casey Muratori who made the argument that we could return to having nice ABIs that are canonical APIs, and still have more than one program running via hardware virtualization features. Then any OS would just be like a hypervisor managing all of the OS-less VMs that, from their perspective, are interacting directly with hardware. It was an interesting idea.
- derefr 8y ago
- cptskippy 8y agoThe evolution of DOS and Windows over the last 30 years makes me wonder if Windows is really even Windows. It started out as a Windowing environment that ran on top of DOS but with Windows 95 it switched to a Windowing OS that also ran DOS. Later all of that was replaced with an entirely different OS (NT/XP) that basically supports the legacy OS in emulation.
- buckminster 8y agoNT had win32 from day one and it predates 95.
- cptskippy 8y agoYes and it wasn't really Windows. If you put a Windows 3.1 user in front of an NT machine they'd have been very confused.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoWin NT 3.X had the same interface with Program Manager.
- Sharlin 8y agoYou mean this one? [1] The shells in 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1/3.5 were identical. Except the latter wouldn't hard crash the machine every time a program did something naughty, which might indeed be confusing to a consumer 3.1 user... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#/media/File:Windows_NT_3.1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#/media/File:Win...
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoIf you put a Windows 3.1 user in front of a 95 machine they'd have been very confused. Exactly as confused, as it happens.
- zzo38computer 8y agoAlthough there are differences, many keyboard commands are the same, and some other stuff is also similar. Double clicking the icon to the left of the title closes the window, and double clicking the title maximizes the window, in both versions of Windows. ALT+F4 still closes the window, too. DOS commands are mostly the same (although Windows NT changes this somewhat, but still it is closely enough that you may be able to use without too much difficulty). All of this despite they move all of the menus around everywhere to make that stuff confusing.
- e12e 8y agoMaybe something happened with xp too, but "windows 2000" was the departure to "NT kernel" land for desktops/home users AFAIK. (I guess xp was really 2000 with windows 95 heritage bling added). Maybe they did try to force windows millenium on poor saps parallel to w2k - and didn't quit that racket until xp?
- basch 8y agoWindows 2000 was not a home OS. Windows ME was. 2000 being NT and ME being DOS.
- Animats 8y agoSure it was. I ran NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000 at home. Avoided all the horrors of the DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally got it right at Windows 7. It's been downhill since then, with Microsoft trying to make the desktop look like a phone.
- blattimwind 8y ago> If however you had already been experiencing systems like UNIX that ran on everything from mainframes to PDP-11/70's you would not have been quite so surprised. Back then (R) there wasn't one UNIX, rather everyone had their flavour of it for their kind of machine. I don't think source compatibility became mainstream until the late 80s to 90s, before that it was all ports.
- markbnj 8y ago>> at the hands of a former VAX software architect Dave Cutler. I think he is still a Senior Technical Fellow at MS and a lead developer on Azure.
- nineteen999 8y agoHe also did a lot of work on the Xbox One hypervisor.
- fulafel 8y agoInteresting. I found this article about it, though it's not very technical: https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...
- dasmoth 8y agoAt the time this switchover was happening, I remember being pretty excited about things like protected memory. But in retrospect, I think it’s a shame there hasn’t really been a continuation of the “monitor” type interface. I could imagine them winning at things like minimising latency when responding to user input.
- tinus_hn 8y agoThe Windows NT kernel always was Cutlers neat and tidy core with ugly parts bolted on because they somewhat made sense at the time. These parts are integrated pretty deeply so it’s quite hard to use this kernel in a system that’s not Windows with a desktop. So although it’s a race for Microsoft against Microsoft but it’s still somewhat of an achievement they ended up with this result.
- partiallypro 8y agoIt's an exciting concept within Microsoft and the Windows team and could bring good things. But it's not a unique concept, no.
- rayiner 8y agoSolaris doesn't scale down to cell phones, and Darwin doesn't scale up to 896-core servers. Linux does scale like that, but Linux is pretty unusual in that regard too.
- detuur 8y agoThat is actually a really good point. At the end of the day there are many, many kernels out there and only Linux, BSD, and NT scale from all the way at the bottom to all the way at the top. I actually even recall my scepticism when MS announced Windows for IoT platforms (not that this scepticism has abated, though).
- clhodapp 8y agoWindows doesn't scale down quite as far and thus Microsoft's lastest answer for IoT is actually Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Sphere
- wvenable 8y agohttps://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot
- icebraining 8y agoAccording to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/minimum-hardware-requirements-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min..., IoT Core needs 256MB of RAM. The Azure Sphere will run on 4. So that seems to validate that it can't actually scale down quite as far.
- pjmlp 8y agoIf you ever bothered to watch Sphere talks, the reason has nothing to do with scale, rather with OEMs, licensing and access to source code for customization.
- lizknope 8y agoSun had different kernels for the sun4c and sun4m architectures. In this infamous post David Miller brags about how he has made a single Linux kernel capable of booting on both. https://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html https://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html and then the response from Bryan Cantrill
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoThat is freaking hilarious.
- gnu8 8y agoThere are still a lot of people out there who don’t understand that there are computing environments outside of Microsoft Windows. Not as many as there were in the 1990’s, but still quite a few.