Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear

On 10/31/2024 2:05 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> writes:

On 10/31/2024 4:39 AM, D wrote:

>

 

Fortunately, on the server side, I do hope that windows ship of theseus
experiment with WSL, will finally reached the end station, of becoming a
linux. ;)

>
I suspect that ship sailed a long time.  It would have been nice if the
Windows NT project was based on FreeBSD instead of the VAX VMS clone
that Dave Cutler wrote.

 FreeBSD didn't exist when DC started at Microsoft in '88.  Both AT&T
and Berkely Software Distributions existed, along with a bevy of
proprietary unix implementations.
 At that time BSD was likely not considered as mature as VMS,
and to be quite fair, VMS was a well designed and well written
operating system widely proven in production.   BSD was mostly
relegated to research roles primarily, the exception being
SUN who used it (plus a bit of system V) for the first four
releases of SunOS before switching to AT&T System V.
 

>
I advocate the reading of "Showstopper", it will amaze you.
  https://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-Microsoft/dp/1497638836
>
"Showstopper is the dramatic, inside story of the creation of Windows
NT, told by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary. Driven by
the legendary David Cutler, a picked band of software engineers
sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable,
operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through
the next decade of development in the computing business."

 I've worked on both the VMS sources and the NT (4.0) sources.   There
are similarities, particularly in the I/O subsystem, but NT never provided
the full set of VMS capabilities (pun intended).  If DC had dumped
cmd.exe from NT and eschewed DOS compatability, the world might have
ended up in a better place :-).
 In both cases, while DC was a key contributor, there were many dozen
other highly qualified engineers involved in the creation of both
VMS and NT.

VMS had one horrible problem.  When it ran out of virtual ram, you were toast.  It could not survive that event and required a hard reboot.  It happened on several of our Vaxen.
Lynn