4 ms·

It was light and day. It is what it is because of the man in charge. Billy G knew that even he didn't have the skills to manage the development of NT. Therefor

It was light and day. It is what it is because of the man in charge. Billy G knew that even he didn't have the skills to manage the development of NT. Therefore he got a guy called Dave Cutler to head it up. Dave was the man because he used to work for DEC on a project called Onyx and prism (A hardware/software combo to do essentially what NT does) was cancelled by DEC at the last minute. MS wanted him that much that they brought his entire Development team to MS (not one person was left behind, at his demand. They where quite ...tribal...) This is also part of the reason NT originally worked on DEC systems as well. It's all in a rather fascinating book called Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft For a few bucks it really is a most excellent read that goes into some techy and really fascinating issues they encountered. One of the biggest was Memory was so little back then.

wongarsu 4y ago
I quite like the NT kernel from a design standpoint. Sadly some of the cooler features were removed over time, like offering Win32, Posix and OS/2 APIs as equal subsystems for interacting with the kernel (though the capability became useful again with WSL1). The entire user management and rights management story is very well thought out; somewhat complicated but incredibly powerful. And while it's not the fastest kernel out there, it really excels at keeping the system interactive and useful under CPU and memory pressure. If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't properly surfaced in the Windows UI.
shadowofneptune 4y ago
My favorite details from the book: • It is old enough where it has to explain email to the reader, and explain why Gates would be obsessively looking at it throughout the day. • The project got slowed down by adopting a cool but unproven new language called C++. The 'rewrite it in Rust' of its time.

wongarsu 4y ago

I quite like the NT kernel from a design standpoint. Sadly some of the cooler features were removed over time, like offering Win32, Posix and OS/2 APIs as equal subsystems for interacting with the kernel (though the capability became useful again with WSL1). The entire user management and rights management story is very well thought out; somewhat complicated but incredibly powerful. And while it's not the fastest kernel out there, it really excels at keeping the system interactive and useful under CPU and memory pressure. If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't properly surfaced in the Windows UI.

shadowofneptune 4y ago

My favorite details from the book: • It is old enough where it has to explain email to the reader, and explain why Gates would be obsessively looking at it throughout the day. • The project got slowed down by adopting a cool but unproven new language called C++. The 'rewrite it in Rust' of its time.