15 ms·
Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
- mepian 3y agoThe link seems to point to "No Dignity Speedrun Any%" instead of anything related to Dave Cutler?.. EDIT: The link is correct now.
- kbmr 3y agohow far did you get into No Dignity Speedrun Any% before realizing something was off
- huseyinkeles 3y agoIrrelevant link. People just upvoted this to the homepage without checking the video?
- fortran77 3y ago> People just upvoted this to the homepage without checking the video? I have news for you! People here comment on articles they didn't read. All the time.
- smolder 3y agoReading the article is pure folly! They'll steal your IP address, inject silly JavaScript into your hypertext markup interpreter, render their text in unpleasing typefaces and suboptimal contrast, hold you ransom with cookie popups or paywalls... One must protect oneself. The only way to safely interact with the world wide web (called "web" because it's a trap like a spider web!) is to gleen what you can 2nd hand, from the hackernews comments.
- implements 3y agoYou’re being downvoted, but that’s exactly how I use HNs - if the comments are interesting enough then it’s probably worth clicking the link.
- smolder 3y agoJoking around tends to earn downvotes, and that's okay --preferable, even. Your approach is quite common, I think. I very often look at comments first, too, depending on the topic & source. The only time skipping the article is any kind of issue is when people start engaging in the comments without proper context.
- gmiller123456 3y agoI'm curious as to why this comment is downvoted?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gozzoo 3y agoI do this sometimes, usually when the topic seems interesting, but I'm not familiar with it, so I don't know if it's worth spending time reading the whole article. By voting up, I hope that it will remain on the home page longer, so that people will notice it and comment on it. Then, if many people comment and if the comments look interesting, I might read the main article.
- ripley12 3y agoI upvoted without checking because I'd seen the new Cutler interviews elsewhere and assumed the link would be correct. Whoops.
- alexjplant 3y agoThe correct link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE
- dang 3y agoFixed. Thanks!
- sneed_chucker 3y agoLooking forward to listening to all of this. Regardless of you feelings towards him or the company he works for, Cutler has been a very influential software engineer through his work on OpenVMS and Windows NT, and I don't think he's talked about as much as the Bell Labs gang, Stallman, Linus, Stroustrup, and so on.
- mrweasel 3y agoThe interviewer, Dave Plummer, is also is also an amazingly interesting person in his own right. I particularly enjoyed his retro-coding videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm used to, he speaks warmly about his job, co-workers and Microsoft, while acknowledging much of the weirdness going on in Redmond. Only problem is that watching is channel will trigger something in the YouTube algorithm and flood your feed with videos on ADHD. Presumably it has to do with his videos on autism and ADHD, but I feel like YouTube should be smart enough to notice that I didn't watch to videos, only those on coding and Microsoft history.
- justin66 3y agoYouTube recommendations have always been pretty awful, incentivizing people to avoid exploring videos on controversial topics once they learn that if they do so, they’ll be inundated with garbage on that topic. The recent forcing of people (including me) to turn off their ad blockers was an eye opener. Holy crap, YouTube ads are hot garbage, and it’s embarrassing to think that any humans respond to them. YouTube has abandoned any pretense of offering a good user experience. Worth digging around in the muck a little to watch something as great as this Dave Cutler interview, though.
- brakmic 3y agoHow to circumvent youtube's anti-adblock mechanism: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_16_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtu...
- cronix 3y agoAll I had to do was update the rules for Adblock Plus free version. I'd been getting the warnings for several days, then yesterday it would only let me watch 3 videos. I then updated AB+ rules and nothing pops up and things just play like "normal."
- randomifcpfan 3y agoThe Computer History Museum oral history interview with David Cutler is also very good: Part 1: https://youtu.be/29RkHH-psrY https://youtu.be/29RkHH-psrY Part 2: https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss
- pjmlp 3y agoThanks for the heads up.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoYes, having watched that I'm waiting to see if there's substantial difference in the content between the two. I've watched a few snippets of this new interview, but so far I am not sure I heard anything new.
- dboreham 3y agoNice to see the full 3h version posted here.
- mikewarot 3y agoLooking back on all both Daves said, there is an extraordinary amount of attention paid to getting things done and out the door, and almost no mention of planning ahead, and actual security strategy. Its all commercial pressure to get the sausage out of the meat grinder, and keep the failures down to an acceptable level. No wonder things never get better, and never take a turn in the right direction, industry wide. I used to think we'd eventually get to capability based security, but now I see we'll always be stuck with application permission flags, the almost worthless bastard cousin, instead. I weep for the future.
- fassssst 3y agoI mean a lot of this stuff was built before the internet.
- pdw 3y agoMore accurately, before Microsoft cared about the Internet.
- Aloha 3y agoNo, not just that, but before the idea that most systems would be internet connected. NT's design was started in 1989 and 3.1 was released in 1993 - development started a full 7 years before the idea of a connected world was commonplace, and a full 12 years before wide deployment of broadband. Whatever comes along that is a clean break with NT, and Unix - will have these assumptions built in.
- mikewarot 3y agoPOSIX is incompatible with security. Any such new system can not support it to have any hope of being secure. Do you think folks can live with that? It's like trying to introduce outlets and circuit breakers to folks used to just hot wiring directly to the grid. The idea of the OS directly enforcing the will of the user(through power boxes that return handles/capabilities, instead of dialogs that return names) takes a little adjustment.
- jmbwell 3y agoFor those who misread the title as I did, this is not Dave Coulier. Moreover, it is not Dave Coulier wearing stonewashed jeans and a mullet, making Full House era jokes, in a forgotten Microsoft promotional video about Windows 95.
- jgalt212 3y agocut it out!
- jmmv 3y agoI’ll recommend here the book “Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”, which someone else recommended a few weeks ago. Link: I’m still reading it, but it’s really enjoyable. And it makes me wish I had been part of that history. Particularly the whole thing about dogfooding a brand new OS. But it caught me a few years too early.
- _mlvljr 3y agoHow about https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Bill-Gates-Jennifer-Edstrom/dp/0805057544 https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Bill-Gates-Jennifer-Edstro... ? :)
- dblohm7 3y agoAlso a great book
- reubenswartz 3y agoGreat book. I remember reading it on the flight out to a job interview with an OS team. Thanks to the book, I sounded much more knowledgable than I really was, and I was more excited about the whole space than I had been a few days earlier. ;-) (Got the offer, but didn't end up taking the job.)
- dewey 3y agoI came here to mention exactly that, I read it a few months ago and really enjoyed it too. Relevant too: https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/
- trentnelson 3y agoFantastic book that had a huge impact on me. I reached out to the author on Twitter way back to tell him how much I liked it, and he was really nice.
- CurtHagenlocher 3y agoI knew someone who worked on the Windows kernel in the "aughts". Apparently, Dave Cutler was still looking at kernel code reviews back then, and could be quite unsparing in his feedback.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoHard to believe this guy is 81. He looks and sounds like he's in his late 60s.
- Waterluvian 3y agoWe’ve got such range as a species. Yesterday I read about a 99 year old walking up 1776 stairs of the CN Tower. I’d probably require medevac if I tried that.
- sgt 3y agoHe looks 65 to 66, but his ears give it away. Definitely in his 80s. However, his energy is that of someone in their 30s or 40s!
- TMWNN 3y agoCutler was a total jock in high school and college. <https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930516&slug=1701620 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930516&slug...> Showstopper talks about his continued focus on athletics while whipping the NT team to finish the job and get it out the door.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI've been watching Dave's garage for a while now and really love it. The combination of new projects and "war stories" as well as his personality ticks all the boxes for me.
- fidotron 3y agoThis is fascinating in so many respects. One is it is almost like his whole career developed through a series of events attempting to escape the usual bureaucracy of successful companies.
- petercooper 3y agoThe bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me before.
- muststopmyths 3y agoPackaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .
- dijit 3y agosort of, if you go back into the NES and Gameboy days, sure, but PS2/Xbox had an operating system that it loaded and so did PS3/Xbox 360. Microsoft took a step "backwards" in allowing it to load any variant of the SDK that you built the game with. In contrast, you had to keep rebuilding your PS4 games when they came out with new major SDK versions, so the development experience was definitely better on the xbox one. (oh, and you could turn a test kit into a retail kit was great too, as someone who worked closer to live operations than dev only).
- mhh__ 3y agoThe Wii UI is partly a library (shared library even?) iirc
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoUnikernel, baby! (Everything old really is new again, and I love it)
- TMWNN 3y agoMany PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games. Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.
- indigodaddy 3y agoIs it not unbelievably rare to get an interview with Dave Cutler or even to get him to speak on camera at all?
- xyst 3y agoNot a fan of MS as a business. But the tech that built the business is fascinating. Surprised to see an 81 y/o still working. Dude looks good. Haven’t fully watched the episode (3hrs long!). But it’s queued.
- tbalci 3y agoDave Plummer is making an amazing job in his channel with the things about Microsoft. This interview with Dave Cutler cannot be missed.
- rvba 3y agoDave somehow looks like he aged 5-10 years when compared to his first videos
- sgt 3y agoMaybe just the beard?
- eismcc 3y agoI worked in the windows kernel team and my favorite story about DC is when he basically made x64 happen because he hated Itanium architecture so much. He worked with AMD and basically made it happen while cranking in his corner office.
- CSSer 3y agoThere’s a little segment where he talks about that! It blew me away because he so casually mentions how it happened as a side project. I hope someday I can manage to put something that impressive together in my free time.
- bitwize 3y agoWhat's intriguing to me is that Itanic was the "fetch" that Intel tried to make happen not once, not twice, but three times: once as iAPX 432, once as i860, and once as Itanium. The whole idea of "pack multiple (often variable bit-length) instructions into a word and rely on compiler writers to determine optimal instruction packings" to make implementation simpler and therefore hopefully faster, but woe betide thee if thy compiler dost not find such optimal instruction packings; for then thy CPU will actually run code more slowly than a conventional design like x86! Someone very high up at Intel must've been very in love with this idea, as it was tried and flopped thrice throughout Intel's entire history as a major microprocessor vendor. I didn't think AMD64 was a good idea at the time because it was more of the same. But good on Dave for helping eliminate the cruft that pretty much killed the RISC revolution.
- tedunangst 3y agoFunny in contrast to all the "I want the cpu to do what I tell it and nothing else" comments in every thread about speculative execution.
- philjohn 3y agoThinking about instruction packing and if this is something a JIT could have helped with, if we'd had state-of-the-art JIT's at the time.
- cfn 3y agoCutler: ...Microsoft had DOS which was pathetic... Dave: .. I wrote some of that! That was hilarious. I still remember how good NT even though it struggled in my 486 with 4Mb of RAM, Dave Cutler is a legend.
- canucker2016 3y agoNear the tail end of WinNT 3.1 development, I read an article (possibly from Usenet) about someone creating a screensaver that showed a bluescreen. I had never created a screensaver before. I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver. So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled together my first and only Windows screensaver. I sent an email to the Windows NT group announcing my creation for laughs and giggles. A few weeks later, the NT build group decided to play a prank on Dave Cutler. They installed my bluescreen screensaver on one of their build servers. They also unplugged the mouse and keyboard from the build server. Then they waited... Dave Cutler comes in to check on the status of the latest NT build. He turns on the monitor and sees a bluescreen. He tries moving the mouse. Nothing. He tries typing on the keyboard. Nothing. Then the unanticipated happens. He reaches over and pushes the power button on the build server to reboot the build server. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I never heard about the aftermath/any fallout from their prank. With great power comes great responsibility.
- macintux 3y agoHow in the world was that unanticipated?
- ww520 3y agoBecause a blue screen is a nice spot to debug. It’s like an assert statement. You want to find out what’s the error code, where it happens, and why. Even a vague location can narrow down the problematic area.
- justin66 3y agoRight, and you can look into all of that… after you restart the machine
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI guess if you're in the OS Dev group maybe they can attach a debugger to the live system?
- spondyl 3y agoI haven't watched this video yet but I'm looking forward to it, having read Showstopper[1] quite a few years back. One thing that stuck out to me when I was still in my early 20s thinking I needed to work all the time was the mention that Dave would always take holidays on time, every time without any debate. While I may not love Microsoft, it was probably my first real exposure of a highly competent and qualified person who wasn't grinding 24/7. It still feels nuts to write it but it's a holdover from rural (and retail) life where the mindset is basically "The more you suffer, the more virtuous you are". As much as I still struggle to properly take time off (that is, it's easy to postpone because of X or Y being more important), thinking about Dave's view is always a good reminder that it's not a choice between taking a break and being good at X. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
- fatherzine 3y agoI wish I would have more spiritual and material insights onto how the 24/7 grind mindset became widespread in USA, possibly via Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic. The foundations do prescribe regular perusal of relief valves. 8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&version=NKJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&ver...
- mmastrac 3y ago24/6 grind kinda sucks though. We need three point five Sabbath days really.
- 3y ago
- simplyinfinity 3y agoInteresting tidbit.. DC mentions he's using 96 core Thread Ripper.. which got announced 1 day before the release of the video.
- Keyframe 3y agoI caught that too! It's either he got an early proc since he's Dave Cutler (see his other mentions of AMD in the talk) or he confused it with EPYC. Considering he mentioned he has two machines, the other 64-core and how AMD approached him before on 64-bit and all.. I'd venture to guess he got in early.
- dilyevsky 3y ago> Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do Love it
- trentnelson 3y agoOne of the most pivotal moments in my software engineering career came from reading the leaked NT source code (6-7 years ago) in conjunction with reading the Showstopper[1] book. The NT leak is particularly fascinating because it included all of the author history, so you can see exactly what files Dave Cutler worked on. The book goes into detail about how we ended up with things like kernel modules having pageable sections -- which is fascinating in its own right. The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code. Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
- trentnelson 3y agoI keep meaning to try ask Bill Gates this question whenever he does one of his Reddit AMAs: Bill, what are you most proud of out of the following two: 1. Getting Cutler to come over from DEC and spearhead NT. 2. Committing to backwards compatibility early on, that ensured old apps Just Worked on new versions of Windows. I don’t think Microsoft would look like it currently does without either of those two historical paths taken.
- leecommamichael 3y agoCutler credits Steve Ballmer as the reason he joined Microsoft in the linked video.
- trentnelson 3y agoOh, absolutely. I more meant from the "CEO of Microsoft" perspective; I guess I could ask Ballmer the same thing if he did an AMA.
- HankB99 3y agoI was hoping to get some insight into the roots of NT. At the time my understanding was that it resulted from the split between IBM and MSFT and that MSFT was already developing NT based on their derivative of OS/2. That was IIRC before Dave Cutler went to MSFT. Later on that (OS/2 -> NT) seems to have been scrubbed from history and NT is now derived from VMS. I'm curious where the truth lies. It was well documented at the time that early NT error messages occasionally identified themselves as OS/2. I'm over an hour in and not sure how close I'm getting to that. At about 1:09:00 Cutler states that they "developed NT on OS/2" but I think he meant their toolchain was hosted on OS/2 (and they couldn't wait to get off of it.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- twoodfin 3y agoThe Smithsonian has a copy of the “NT OS/2 Design Workbook” by Cutler and others on the team. I don’t think there’s a piece of technical writing I’d more like to read. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_742559 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...
- rifkiamil 3y agoWas the origin of 'NT' in 'Windows NT' really New Technology? Some suggest that the name might have originated from the Intel i860 CPU. Originally, NT was targeted at the Intel i860 CPU, codenamed N10 (or "N-Ten"). Dave Cutler's put to rest that it was 'New Technology' https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=2ZCM44xPTR831MeR&t=4233&v=xi1Lq79mLeE&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=2ZCM44xPTR831MeR&t=4233&v=x...
- cafard 3y agoSome pointed out the advancing each letter in VMS yields WNT.
- bullen 3y agoI finally plowed through the computer parts of this interview. This tells you so much about how Microsoft works they probably will want it removed from the internet. Not directly but implicitly between the lines. My conclusion is that what built our winners today is just infinite amounts of energy and random selection until something stuck to the wall. Complete bat shit ranges of bit sizes and competing infrastructure (you cannot compete with infrastructure because uniformity is the main driver)!!! This is not a technique we will have the luxury of using from now on.