Slashdot Mirror
Inside The Development of Windows NT
mrpuffypants writes "Winsupersite has a 3 part series this month about the history and development of Windows NT all the way up through Windows Server 2003. The author goes fairly in-depth describing how Windows is developed, managed, and how all 50 million+ lines are compiled daily. Part One covers the history of NT from its early days at Microsoft and Part Two discusses how the deployment of the forthcoming server version of Windows is coordinated daily." *shiver*
GameTab - Game Reviews Database
No. Dave Cutler, who was lead developer for NT, was previously one of the lead developers for VMS. I don't think that MS actually took any of the source code from VMS for NT, however.
I thought the initial NT "heavily borrowed" (MS tradition) from the Digital Equipment Corp (now part of HP) VAX operating system. Then it gradually incorporated parts of the evolving Windows/DOS OS.
That would be VMS (some VAXen ran Ultrix, poor things). IBM and MS started a collaboration called OS/2, then later decided to part ways. Whatever MS's other motives were in the split, MS was staking its entire future on what was to IBM a toy project, so MS wasn't entirely enthusiastic about development at IBM speed. IBM kept the OS/2 name, MS hired Dave Cutler from DEC, Cutler dubbed the new fork WNT: that's the letters after VMS, and any expansion is entirely a backronym.
NT does include some of VMS's heritage, including strong async I/O support throughout. The DOS stuff is really a matter of emulating the interface -- a whole lot of work went into making drive letters and backslashes work everywhere, believe it or not. Not surprisingly, it tends to share more in common with OS/2, with the supervisor design and the object manager for starters.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If you look at other large projects of this type (eg Mozilla), both clean builds and dep builds using make are done on automated build systems. The two types of builds will find different types of issues.