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Core Windows is, still, Windows NT, which was designed by Dave Cutler, who designed a number of OSes for DEC, which changed its name to Digital before it was bo
by cbd1984 12y ago
Core Windows is, still, Windows NT, which was designed by Dave Cutler, who designed a number of OSes for DEC, which changed its name to Digital before it was bought by Compaq, which then merged with HP, which is its own can of worms.
Cutler designed RSX-11M, VMS, and VAXELN (a real-time OS for the VAX), which are or were all serious OSes. VMS in specific was a serious competitor to Unix; in the form of OpenVMS, running on Alpha and Itanium, it still exists.
So Windows NT is a foundation made by someone who knows OSes and OS design; in many markets (not all, not that I think my parenthetical will stop people from "correcting" me) it's the last OS family not based on a fundamentally Unix-like foundation. Having an Open Source version of that is interesting for historical reasons, if nothing else, and there's something to be said for hybrid vigor if some bright spark figures a way to port a few concepts to the rest of the OS world.
- rbanffy 12y agoAs surprising as this may sound, it seems OpenVMS is still under active development, even though not by HP. Even an x86-based version is on their roadmap. http://www.vmssoftware.com/ http://www.vmssoftware.com/
- elektronjunge 12y agoThat company is an HP contractor.
- heywire 12y agoFor anyone who is interested in the story of the original development of Windows NT, check out the G. Pascal Zachary book, Showstopper.
- teh_klev 12y agoI would agree, not read my copy for a very long time but it's very enjoyable. I think I read it at around the same time as I last read "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, also a worthwhile read for some of the younger HN'ers who missed out on that era.
- ch_123 12y agoIn between his work on VMS and VAXELN, and leaving for Microsoft, he was also responsible for a system called "Mica" which was intended to be a micro kernel system which supported both a Unix and VMS layer on the system, and was written in an in-house Pascal-like language called Pillar. FWIW, NT was inspired by some of the ideas they had while designing Mica. http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/prism/mica/Mica_Software_Business_Plan_Mar87.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/prism/m... http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/prism/mica/Pillar_Language_Specification_Nov88.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/prism/m...