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Comment by Scrantonicity | Hacker News Reader

Usually when you're working on the scale of operating systems, you have people focusing on particular areas e.g. kernel teams, networking teams, graphics teams etc and you also have their corresponding test teams. So no one person usually even has understanding of the entire source code.

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Not even Dave Cutler? I thought he single-handedly wrote the first version of the kernel. At least that is the legend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Lots of great stories about him. One is recounted here:

https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/930/xbox-co-founder-my...

The kernel is a pretty small part of the operating system. Development of Windows NT started in 1989[1], when RAM sizes of PCs were measured in MB, not GB, so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat. (NT 3.1 could run on a machine with 12 MB of RAM.[2]) Also, it wasn't the first kernel Cutler wrote. While Cutler is undoubtedly a brilliant programmer, I doubt he could keep the details of all the other parts of the system (graphics, etc.) in his head at once.

Other well known kernels were also written by very small teams. The first Unix kernel was written by two people and the first Linux kernel was written by one person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Development

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Hardware_requiremen...

> so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat

That's not how NT was seen at the time. It was quite bloated relative to other PC OSs. Of course modern OS features required a bit more overhead than the crazy world of windows 3.0.

I guess I should have said "a lot of bloat by today's standards"...

My first experience with NT was NT 3.51 on a 32 MB machine. If I remember well, it didn't feel much slower than Windows 3.1. But finally having a PC operating system that didn't crash all the time really made development much more pleasant and productive.

32MB was a lot of memory back then. Typical machines at the time had 8. 16 was extravagant.

A lot of affordable machines a few years old even had 4M. I remember my dad upgraded from 4 to 8 and from Win3.11 to Win95. The computer had maybe 1 or 2 years, hardly more. It was around 1500€ (well, it was 10000 FRF at the time) when bought, with a 14" screen.

32M was insane, probably out of reach of all but rich homes.

Only a few years later (1 or 2) a classmate told us he had a computer with 128M. That sounded so ridiculous that we thought he was a mythomaniac or something. Turns out his dad was able to get a powerful workstation from work, and the first time we visited him we saw that mythical beast, and our mind were blown.

And right now the private working set of my start menu process is 27M...

Cutler certainly did not write the whole first kernel alone, although the initial size of the NT team was quite small, at least at the very beginning. The story of the development (until the at least the first release, IIRC) is in the book "Show Stopper!"; quite interesting.

Show Stopper is a wonderful book if you're interested in the historical development of large systems. It's second only to The Soul of a New Machine. I highly recommend it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1497638836

Two of my very favorites!

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