Re: Byte ordering

In article <vdvvae$1k931$2@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro) wrote:

Dave Cutler came from DEC (where he was one of the resident
Unix-haters) to mastermind the Windows NT project in 1988. When did
the OS/2-NT pivot take place?

1990, after the release of Windows 3.0, which was an immediate commercial
success. It was the first version that you could get serious work out of.
It's been compared to a camel: a vicious brute at times, but capable of
doing a lot of carrying.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup>

Funny, you'd think they would use that same _personality_ system to
implement WSL1, the Linux-emulation layer. But they didn't.

They were called subsystems in Windows NT, and ran on top of the NT
kernel. The POSIX one came first, and was very limited, followed by the
Interix one that was called Windows Services for Unix. Programs for both
of these were in PE-COFF format, not ELF. There was also the OS/2
subsystem, but it only ran text-mode programs.

The POSIX subsystem was there to meet US government purchasing
requirements, not to be used for anything serious. I can't imagine Dave
Cutler was keen on it.

WSL1 seems to have been something odd: rather than a single subsystem, a
bunch of mini-subsystems. However, VMS/NT kernels just have different
assumptions about programs from Unix-style kernels, so they went to
lightweight virtualisation in WSL2.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux#History>

The same problem seems to have messed up all the attempts to provide good
Unix emulation on VMS. It's notable that MICA started out trying to
provide both VMS and Unix APIs, but this was dropped in favour of a
separate Unix OS before MICA was cancelled.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA#Design_goals>

I think the whole _personality_ concept, along with the supposed
portability to non-x86 architectures, had just bit-rotted away by
that point.

Some combination of that, Microsoft confidence that "of course we can do
something better now!" - they are very prone to overconfidence - and the
terrible tendency of programmers to ignore the details of the old code.

John