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Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook
- markus_zhang 9mo agoI think this is the only place that hosts a (hopefully) full electronic copy of the book.
- jdboyd 9mo agoFor those unclear on what the large pile of .doc and .pdf files are, it appears to be some revision of the design documents for "NT OS/2", which then turned into just NT. This appears to be the Smithsonian description of their physical copy: https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-windows-nt-os2-design-workbook%3Anmah_742559 https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-windows-nt-os2-design-wo...
- markus_zhang 9mo agoYeah I think this is the original design doc for NT.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 9mo ago> The first release of NT is planned as a workstation product that will provide a strong competitor to UN*X based workstations. UN*X spelling for trademark reasons or a joke that UNIX is verboten at Microsoft?
- AshamedCaptain 9mo agoIt is a generic way to refer to unix and unix-like systems. It is still in use today, e.g. to indicate Linux as part of the set. For this document most likely it refers to Xenix (MS's unix).
- moron4hire 9mo agoEunuchs is already a plural word.
- cmiles74 9mo agoI think trademark, I remember Bill Gates referring to Windows NT as "a better UNIX than UNIX".
- p_ing 9mo agoOS/2 is likely where that came from - https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/successor_to_unix_plan_9/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/successor_to_unix_pla...
- anthk 9mo agoThat's Plan9 and 9front. I'd say NT it's a better VMS, VMS++ in the alphabet ;), as you get V->W, M->N, S->T, so "WNT".
- fredoralive 9mo agoIIRC Microsoft's internal email still ran on Xenix at the time (until Exchange betas got good enough for internal use c. 1995?), so perhaps more trademarks than some sort of absolute hatred of Unix. Also note that one of the two APIs that NT OS/2 was initially going to support was POSIX, albeit perhaps more because the US government wanted that than a true love of UNIX. Although the design rationale document (ntdesrtl) does lament that existing POSIX test suites tend to also test "...UNIX folklore that happens to be permissible under an interpretation of the POSIX spec".
- nucleative 9mo agoDid Microsoft never run Microsoft Mail internally? It was an email system that ran on top of file system. If I recall, mail clients connected over a networked drive to access mailboxes. So it was never regarded as being very scalable.
- canucker2016 9mo agoYes, MS Mail for PC Networks used a shared file system for email. The Workgroup Apps (WGA) divison ran MS Mail for PC Networks since they produced MS Mail. Gotta dogfood your product. The WGA email system used a Xenix gateway to connect with the rest of Microsoft. The rest of Microsoft ran MS Mail for Windows with a Xenix email backend and address book, since MS was already using Xenix before MS Mail for PC Networks existed. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 contained a one postoffice-version of MSMail, (which could be upgraded to the full version). Some more Microsoft email-related history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_Server#Version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_...
- kryptiskt 9mo agoThat was back when there was "real" UNIX around, as well as a number of clones, including Microsofts own Xenix (maybe they had offloaded that to SCO by then). So UN*X was one way to indicate that it meant UNIX-like OSes.
- kryptiskt 9mo agoTurns out SCO bought Xenix in 1987, but Microsoft was just a couple of years removed from being the biggest Unix vendor around at this point.
- vikingerik 9mo agoAs others are saying, the * is meant as a wildcard, not as censorship. It's meant to also cover the likes of Linux or Xenix etc, although there isn't actually any other name that would strictly fit the pattern of "UN*X".
- themafia 9mo agoSo.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS? If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.
- fredoralive 9mo agoThis mostly describes stuff to do with the [Windows] NT [OS][/2] (delete as appropriate) kernel layer, which normal mere mortals aren't supposed to interact with. You're supposed to use stuff like the Win32 KERNEL32.DLL not the more direct DLL, NTDLL.DLL (a DLL). Of course, true hackers scorn such abstractions.
- p_ing 9mo agoMicrosoft's eye wasn't on open sourcing their OS and describing the deep internals. They still don't want you to develop against the NT API, even though developers certainly do (and Microsoft makes compatibility shims for applications which do, when required).
- torginus 9mo agoTbh, I think Windows' stable ABI/API at all levels + excellent docs is something the open source community could learn from. Software that is poorly documented, has no stable api, and no way of accepting extensions other than modifying the source, is not very 'free', in the sense, that if I have a good idea, I'll have crazy amounts of trouble getting the change to users even if I manage to decipher and modify the source appropriately. This approach describes many software projects. If I wanted to change GCC in a way the original authors didn't approve of, I'd have to fork the entire project and lobby the maintainers to include my versions. If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine, just to list one example. Then I could just put the binary on my website, and others would be able to use it. As for MS not publishing these particular docs - its not like MS doesnt publish tomes on everything, including the kernel. If you're interested in Windows Internals, I recommend the book series of the same name by Pavel Yosifovich, or really anything by him or Mark Rusinovich. Its also a testament to the solidity of Windows' design that tons of stuff written decades ago is still relevant today.
- phendrenad2 9mo agoThis is giving me flashbacks to the times when I had to implement systems based on big, verbose specification documents like this. Horrible. If you really want to understand Windows, skip this and check out Windows 2000 Internals by Solomon and Russinovich (Win2k is a good middle-ground where Windows had matured a bit).
- markus_zhang 9mo agoYeah this is definitely a hell of read which probably has more historical values than real ones. The book "Inside Windows NT" also gives a good overview about Windows NT 3.1. There is another one called "Understanding Windows NT File System" which talks about the fs I think. The biggest problem is NT is not open-source, and while there are leaked copies posted online, there is no "official" build guide so people have to try their luck.
- delta_p_delta_x 9mo agoFor more modern Windows, Windows Internals Parts 1 and 2[1][2], and Windows 10 System Programming Parts 1 and 2. Basically anything by Yosifovich, Russinovich, Ionescu et al. [1]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-part-1-system-architecture-processes-9780735684188 https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-... [2]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-part-2-9780135462409 https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals-... [3]: https://leanpub.com/b/windows10systemprogrammingP1and2 https://leanpub.com/b/windows10systemprogrammingP1and2
- RattlesnakeJake 9mo agoIt's giving me flashbacks to a few months ago. (*cries in X12 270/271*)
- Lammy 9mo agoMy favorite part of NT is the Local Procedure Call (now obsoleted by ALPC): https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkbook/lpc.pdf https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb... Very cool to be able to read the original design instead of just reverse-engineered ones. Thanks for posting!
- ntstatusquo 9mo agoThe section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscious influence that results in you taking the work more seriously, focusing your attention, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclothed_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclothed_cognition
- markus_zhang 9mo agoI agree that in general people are influenced by their perception of themselves. For example I always pretend I'm a kernel programmer when hacking on small kernels. This did lend me a lot of patience to debug and figure things out, which I do not have for my work.
- bombcar 9mo agoIt's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).
- anthk 9mo agoNot with Borland products. Even XEmacs and Emacs had these features (code control was with CVS or close).
- bombcar 9mo agoCVS and RCS and friends were infants; barely more than copying directories or zip files around. Complex merging as we're used to with git was unheard of.
- jen20 9mo agoSource control was in infancy compared to today, but still 15 years old (SCCS) when Windows NT development started!
- Eisenstein 9mo agoI particularly like this bit in ntdesrtl.pdf: "6.1 OS/2 Standards Our initial OS/2 API set centers around the evolving 32-bit Cruiser, or OS/2 2.0 API set. (The design of Cruiser APIs is being done in parallel with the NT OS/2 design.) In some respects, this standard is harder to deal with than the POSIX standards. OS/2 is tied to the Intel x86 architecture and these dependencies show up in a number of APIs. Given the nature of OS/2 design (the joint development agreement), we have had little success in influencing the design of the 2.0 APIs so that they are portable and reasonable to implement on non-x86 systems. In addition, the issue of binary compatibility with OS/2 arises when the system is back-ported to an 80386 platform. This may involve 16-bit as well as 32-bit binary compatibility." Very "professional" coded writing that expresses a frustration with the need to collaborate with IBM that could have been more succinctly written if they had the option to use a few choice four letter words.
- JdeBP 9mo agoAnd also not entirely correct. The 16-bit 1.x API was definitely x86-specific. But the 32-bit 2.x API was not, as evidenced by OS/2 for PowerPC actually existing at one point.
- anthk 9mo agoThe layout it's close to /sys/doc for 9front/plan9 with guides for Acme, Sam editors (the guide to structural expresions as a tutorial and a guide), the Rc shell, the kernel, the ACID debugger, FS' (several, fossil/venti, cwfs and now GeFS), the security, the compilers, the Rio window system, namespaces, processes and channels, plumbing (something like xdg-open but far easier and more powerful), ... much more than a closed source and propietarty NT implementation, as you get the source for free too under libre licenses. Thus, it makes debugging the system a far easier task. And it's far simpler than Unix itself too.
- andsmi2 9mo ago[dead]
- hulitu 9mo agoWindows NT had a design ? It all looks like a bunch of staff thrown at a wall in the hope that it will stick.
- markus_zhang 9mo agoThe core NT team came from DEC and was considered as the "adults" in the whole organization. It's definitely much more organized than DOS/Win 3.X back then.
- jaen 9mo agoI'm very curious about what you consider a real "design" then?! The Windows NT kernel had a better design than most contemporary and succeeding operating systems (including the various Unixes, Linux, BSD, plan9 etc.). Modern kernel designs like Google's Fuchsia have more in common with NT than POSIX/Unix/Linux. In particular, the NT object manager approach subsumes the Unix "everything is a file, well, not quite, oh... uhh.. let us slowly fix that by adding stuff like signalfd, memfd, pidfd etc. ahh hmm, these still do not exactly fit into a FS mold... ah crap, still missing a proper ptrace FS analogue" design approach that eg. Linux has taken in the last two decades. It also had powerful primitives like eg. APCs that could be used to build higher-level kernel features elegantly.
- canucker2016 8mo agoLooking at the authours of the design workbook, I note that there's a college intern in the list. Who says college interns don't do real work? I remember when he told several other interns that they had got "Hello World" to run on the nascent Windows NT.