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As a side point, I believe David Cutler, the venerable OS engineer who programmed and designed three OSes, did not like Unix very much back in the 90s. I wonder
by ferguess_k 1y ago
As a side point, I believe David Cutler, the venerable OS engineer who programmed and designed three OSes, did not like Unix very much back in the 90s. I wonder what was the reason, and did he change his mind later?
- JdeBP 1y agoIt was because adding one to each of the letters in UNIX yields gibberish, but adding one to each of the letters in VMS gets WNT. Era-appropriate joking aside: There's no actual evidence that Cutler held the views on Unix, or even on DEC's Eunice, that have been ascribed to xem from anecdotes by Armando Stettner and edits to Wikipedia and writing by G. Pascal Zachary. I and others went into more detail on this years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814012
- unwind 1y agoReally? VOJY could easily be a modern company, couldn't it? The .dot was parked though ... :)
- gonzopancho 1y agoDidn’t Cutler design Mach?
- JdeBP 1y agoNo. * https://cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/www/people-former.html https://cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/www/people-for...
- ferguess_k 1y agoThanks. Maybe I should change the question to "Which part of Unix design did D.C. think is less appropriate/desirable" to prevent fanning flames...
- lizknope 1y agoThe only thing I remember is from the book Showstopper https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14150/how-should-we-interpret-dave-cutlers-criticism-of-unix https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14150/how... [Cutler] expressed his low opinion of the Unix process input/output model by reciting "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture.
- phendrenad2 1y agoKind of crazy that what is possibly a throwaway remark by Cutler has become the basis for this whole "lore" of Dave hating Unix so much he went and made VMS (or variations on that theme). I guess it's a good story...
- twoodfin 1y agoAlmost all the major ways in which NT deviates from UNIX have strong cases as being architectural wins: - A well-defined HAL for portability - An object manager for unified resource lifecycle and governance - Asynchronous I/O by default - User-facing APIs bundled into independent “personalities” and decoupled from the kernel The only real black mark I’m aware of is the move of the graphics subsystem into the kernel for performance, which I don’t think was Cutler’s idea.
- ferguess_k 1y agoDamn I actually forgot where I got the "dislike Unix" line, I did read the book but I swear that is not the only source that I drafted up this question...