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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*
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.
It's just a big advertising piece about how NT is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sure, it has some entertaining facts, but I'm still not buying it.
_All_ developers are cocky - very cocky. It's not just a Windows thing.
...so full of shit?
To step around the topic for a second:
Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows is dedicated to providing all of the information you need to evaluate Microsoft's current and upcoming Windows operating system technologies. These exciting products include Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows XP Media Center Edition (code-named Freestyle) Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Media 9 Series (code-named Corona), and Windows Server 2003, which will launch in April.
Sounds like it'll be an EXCITING, unbiased, hard hitting, honest review to me!
Maybe that's not the best example. But even when you read technical treatises on Microsoft technologies the authors always manage to pack in gushing, surrealist praise.
Wasn't there even a book? THE AWESOME POWER OF DIRECT3D? Amusingly enough, it was released several months after John Carmack and the rest of the gaming industry started bitching Microsoft out for pushing Direct3D over the clearly superior OpenGL.
I'd hate to be all conspiracy here, but damn it's either that or believing that all Microsoft reviewers/writers are really stupid.
how they were so slow to bring NT to the Alpha.
Really.
I was surprised to learn from the article how the early NT was so non x86 centric, shifting from i860 to R3000, etc. They even boast of the portability to different hardware because they weren't tied down to the x86 instruction set so tightly as were the 16 bit Windows developers at the time.
So, why, then, did the Alpha port of NT take so long? And, from what I understand, it relied heavily upon the ability of the early Alpha chip to run in some FX!32 compatibility mode to emulate the x86 instruction set.
The Alpha/NT story just doesn't seem to add up to me. There's some missing dark matter.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
. . . just naive and inexperienced.
/. GNU/Linux crowd do the same thing.
You know how to an 8-year-old boy, his dad's favorite sports team is the greatest thing in the world, able to turn lepers to supermodels and bath beads into geltabs? It's basically the same phenomenon.
It stops being amusing after a couple years reading the
You forgot the five thousand developers.
Each person would need to review 50,000,000/(5000*30) = ~333 lines of code per day. Not quite so intimidating.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Does anyone else design an OS in two weeks?
Why bother.
In all the software groups I've been involved in, it's considered good practice to do a full clean build nightly. Doing incremental builds is fine for developers, but when you want to make a drop that goes into an automated testing suite, etc., you do a full clean build each time, "just to be safe."
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
A year ago, Micro$oft claimed the future focus was security and stability. According to Part 2 of the article, the biggest issue now is the name change (from Windows .NET 2003 to Windows Server 2003). So, is this change for greater stability or something to do with marketing?
It's really interesting to see how Microsoft actually relate to their competitors. They wanted to run on PPC, but IBM messed them around. They wanted to work with Novell, but Novell weren't interested. Even Intel failed to deliver on the promise of i860.
Given that, is it any wonder that MS would rather do things "in house" than rely on third parties?
Load of crap, I doubt anybody is spamming slashdot for a book this old.
:)
It is simply the BEST look at the insides and development of NT around. The article on Paul's site is dry and doesn't even remotely express the truth behind NT.
For example, ShowStopper reveils the amount of disgust the NT team (or at least Daves side) -really- felt towards Win16 compatability. The canned articles says how 'easy it was' and what a 'good idea' it was.
Show stopper explains how rejected it REALLY was from most of the team and how much of a complete and utter headache it was to implement the Windows 'personality'.
The articles linked are not bad when talking about the latest version of Windows, but it's very much preaching and definatly doesn't tell much about how NT started out and it's effect on Microsoft as a whole.
The whole GUI thing was actually pretty much a laugh to the DEC people Dave dragged over with him, and the practice of 'eating dogfood' at Microsoft was really first imposed by Dave himself. And there's intresting background on the IBM/MS OS/2 debacle (Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT!) and how Windows very nearly didn't have anything approaching usable graphics until Michael Abrash himself came in with his 'new trick' that actually allowed NT to show graphics at a usable rate and was the first step to removing the console.
Anyway, I don't want to do a book review here, let's just say that the above articles are far too preachy, the book shows the REAL story and I recommend it. And I'm sure that's why the other three people have plugged it also
Yikes.
I figured someone here would post about MS recompiling 50 million lines of code every day.
Does this mean they update each program source every day? The kernel, as well as each of the dlls? It seems like overkill.
Or at least it seems like major code bloat. Perhaps it's too much in the OS itself.
Doesn't linux separate the file system from the user interface? Seems there has to be a better way than the way MS does it.
What I don't get is why it takes 10,000+ developers to develop an operating system. Granted, there are a few nifty utilities included, but it seems like a case of an awful lot of cooks.
For comparison, the Empire State Building took a little over a year and had at most 3,400 workers on the project at any one time.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com