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Bell believes Cutler is the only engineer with the confidence to pull off NT as he did. “Almost anyone who would have been good enough to do NT would have insisted on a blank sheet for the spec,” Bell said. “Dave appreciates legacy and compatibility.”

That seems to be what is missing most with modern software development. Everyone thinks they can do it better, and in the end repeats the same mistakes while creating new ones.

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Hmmm, I still wonder what Windows would look like today and Microsoft had chosen the same path as Apple: create an emulation box for old 'Classic' apps, create a clean new system for new style apps.

That's pretty much what they did, but as a fundamental architecture of the OS. The "emulation box" is the win32 subsystem. Applications interact with the API in the subsystem, which translates, for example, win32 calls to the native NT API. They also created a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem.

You just jogged my memory about WoW (Windows on Windows) :)

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