Slashdot Mirror
Windows NT Turns 20
An anonymous reader writes with a link to the observation from ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley of Windows NT's 20th birthday (it came out on July 27th, 1993): ""In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1. It was followed up by NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. Microsoft's Windows releases still rely on NT-inspired numbering conventions. Windows 7's build numbers commenced with 6.1; Windows 8's with 6.2; and Windows 8.1 with 6.3." The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.""
Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.
I've seen the source and it's a work of art. Whoever they had working on NT 4 for the PnP and other additions really massacred the code.
Originally it was a pretty good design, based on the concepts implemented by DEC's VMS system. It only got butchered later by people who didn't know their stuff as well as the original engineers.
Warts and all, Windows owes it's lineage to VMS and the once mighty DEC.
I've heard there are still places running VMS-based hardware.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The Linux kernel would have bought it a beer, but it hasn't turned 21 yet.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
V +1 = W
M + 1 = N
S + 1 = T
-- Fuck Beta
An article for WinNT turning 20, but nothing for Slackware when it did the same 10 days ago? What is wrong with you, Slashdot?
Wait, don't answer that...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832(v=vs.85).aspx
Wearing pants should always be optional.
When every new release of NT brought with it new and useful features at least I was always excited to upgrade from 3.5 on till about 2K8.
Now nobody seems to care about technology anymore... It is all politics, marketeering and guarding the table to ensure no excess value is ever left upon it. Innovation is now measured by games with shells, errecting walled gardens and fresh paint of questionable quality. Sad to see so much potential go to waste.
Debug an NT device driver.
Hey! I recognize this!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
DOS stopped being in the core with WinME. WinNT was based on VMS and never had DOS lineage.
NT was the last revolutionary product put out by Microsoft. VB3 came out the same summer, and was also revolutionary. Excel 4.0 and Word 2.0 were the only other two revolutionary Microsoft products, and those came out the year previous.
All of these products are essentially unchanged over the past 20 years, with even the same codebase, with the exception of VB 3.0, concepts of which continue in the 2nd generation Visual Studio product (based on the late-90's Visual Interdev platform, chucking the highly responsive 1st generation that ended with Visual Studio 6.0).
I have yet to experience this DLL nightmare you speak of. I've had way more dependency hell on Linux than anything. Say you find a great program that does exactly what you need. Well the author based it off some obscure library that needs a dozen other dependencies
Fortunately, 'apt-get install great-program' always works for me.
I still don't understand how VMS can be compared to NT. They don't even seem remotely similar.
VMS
WNT
Just as HAL was one step ahead of IBM, Windows NT is one step behind VMS.
The DOS line ended with Windows Me. For a while, MS had the home line based on DOS and the business line based on NT. At the turn of the century, they dropped the DOS lineage and just made different versions of the NT lineage (Home and Pro).
OS/2 1.x was primarily done by IBM using IBM's tools
After v1.0. Microsoft was entirely responsible for the initial releases of OS/2.
the 286, a processor designed by IBM for IBM
Wrong. Intel designed the 80286. IBM (along with other chip makers) made their own version later on.
Windows NT 3.51 was the most stable operating system I have ever used.
I miss it sometimes.
Talk about a flawed model. Instead of dealing with the problem (reference management), Linux repositories sweeps the problem under the rug.
I strongly suspect that you do not understand the problem fully.
I then read your post and became convinced.
Linux has no .SO or dependency hell as you seem to think.
On a fine grained level, libraries support symbol versioning (e.g. libstd++) so a new libstdc++ can link against an old program, provided the versions do not drift too far. On a coarser level, you have shared object versioning, so you can have multiple different versions of a .so in a system all within the same path.
On the coarsest level, you can override linker paths manually, so if you want to override a SO include or the other mechanisms can't cope for some reason then it still works.
Once you understand this it is easy to package a binary that runs on basically every Linux distro out there. People who understand include Mozilla, libreOffice, OpenOffice, Mathworks and a whole slew of others. I clearly understand because I can ship binary code with cross distro compatiblity.
Basically it works and it works well.
The thing is that if you're not using a system library, then you need to ship the libraries you're using. This is a minor hassle (compared to the normally trivial ./configure&&make&&sudo make install) and worse it means every tiny utility loads its own copy and takes up that little bit more memory. The thing about having everything on the same .so version if possible is it is really much more efficient for memory use. To package everything separately would involve having vast numbers of duplicates of libraries and would have the lovely upgrade hell that you get on OSX and Windows where every program nags you for updates.
SJW n. One who posts facts.