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This article is just begging for footnotes. > To aid in internationalization, Unicode was used top to bottom, greatly enhancing internationalization. And we a

by JdeBP 3y ago

This article is just begging for footnotes. > To aid in internationalization, Unicode was used top to bottom, greatly enhancing internationalization. And we all know the story of how Unicode then went from 16-bit to 32-bit, rather spoiling things, leading to the world as it is today, with WTF-16 and code page 65001. > NT was a fully 32 bit microkernel operating system with [...] There was a whole lot of debate about this at the time, and the upshot is that by no contemporary measure of what it meant to be one, was Windows NT a microkernel operating system. It's sad to see this come back in potted histories 30 years after the fact, because "microkernel" was more marketing tapping into an operating systems design fad of the time rather than an accurate technical description. > but unlike VMS [...] NT uses its own NTFS [...] In an article calling out the similarities in other aspects, missing the marked parallels between ODS-2 and NTFS, from BITMAP.SYS versus $Bitmap to INDEXF.SYS versus $MFT, is rather silly. > A program written for NT in 1993 can run unmodified on Windows 11 in 2023 as the entire API and userland haven’t changed while everything underneath most certainly has. The interesting part of this sentence being in the discussion of personalities is that the Win32 personality is the only one of the original personalities for which this is true. The 16-bit OS/2 personality doesn't exist any more, the POSIX personality has been superseded four times (2 Interix systems, and then 2 WSLs), and NTVDMs went away with the move to 64-bit. > Microsoft added the win32 API developed for NT to Windows 3.x as well [...] Actually it was Win32s, and an article that mentions the list of caveats for the 16-bit OS/2 API on Windows NT listed in an OS2API.TXT file should really mention that Win32s came with lots of similar caveats about what parts of the Win32 API weren't supported in Win32s. Yes, just like that OS2API.TXT there was a list of what DOS+Windows 3.x did and didn't support, in the SDK. It was WIN32API.CSV. There was also a WIN32S.DAT listing all of the Win32 stuff that didn't work on DOS+Windows 3.x with Win32s.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> the Win32 personality is the only one of the original personalities for which this is true The entire personalities thing was pretty much never used. I could never run anything OS/2 except for a couple 16-bit command line utilities, and the POSIX one was straight garbage and likely the source of many Weirdnix contest stories. It was only until Interix that you could actually source port anything worthwhile, and they quickly hit the limit that the POSIX and Win32 personalities could not speak to each other with anything other than TCP/IP. WSL1 quickly dropped the POSIX personality and switched to the Drawbridge sandbox stuff (in part to be able to access the Win32 subsystem, and to be able to skip PE binaries), and WSL2 followed by dropping the entire idea and using a then more classic HVM.

by JdeBP 3y ago

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> the Win32 personality is the only one of the original personalities for which this is true The entire personalities thing was pretty much never used. I could never run anything OS/2 except for a couple 16-bit command line utilities, and the POSIX one was straight garbage and likely the source of many Weirdnix contest stories. It was only until Interix that you could actually source port anything worthwhile, and they quickly hit the limit that the POSIX and Win32 personalities could not speak to each other with anything other than TCP/IP. WSL1 quickly dropped the POSIX personality and switched to the Drawbridge sandbox stuff (in part to be able to access the Win32 subsystem, and to be able to skip PE binaries), and WSL2 followed by dropping the entire idea and using a then more classic HVM.