For anybody that used to work professionally back in the 90s, I want to ask:
Was Windows NT a good OS? My professor in University was a hardcore Linux fan, but he used to praise NT saying it was the best thing Microsoft did.
Was Windows NT a good OS? My professor in University was a hardcore Linux fan, but he used to praise NT saying it was the best thing Microsoft did.
Dave was the man because he used to work for DEC on a project called Onyx and prism (A hardware/software combo to do essentially what NT does) was cancelled by DEC at the last minute.
MS wanted him that much that they brought his entire Development team to MS (not one person was left behind, at his demand. They where quite ...tribal...)
This is also part of the reason NT originally worked on DEC systems as well.
It's all in a rather fascinating book called Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
For a few bucks it really is a most excellent read that goes into some techy and really fascinating issues they encountered. One of the biggest was Memory was so little back then.
If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't properly surfaced in the Windows UI.
• It is old enough where it has to explain email to the reader, and explain why Gates would be obsessively looking at it throughout the day.
• The project got slowed down by adopting a cool but unproven new language called C++. The 'rewrite it in Rust' of its time.
From the userland and UI perspective, well, it's just Windows, both in the positive and negative sense; NT is the granddady of Windows XP and Windows 7 both of which were well regarded but NT also suffered from all the warts and ugliness caused by being converted into a consumer OS.
Microsoft has always had a shit ton of extremely smart people, mired in two shit tons of middling execs.
Windows NT was what happened when the product / political side of the company ignored the technologists for a bit.
NT4 was better than 95 in every way, but was merely mediocre. Microsoft's suite of workplace tools that ran on NT4 were janky and broken, requiring their own college degree to set up and administer, but they also represented a real productivity boost for many teams.
This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work).
How in C:\>'s name would that have been possible? Windows 95 was an unholy mixture of 16bit code running in vm86 mode interleaved with 32bit code, and nearly full Windows 3.1 compatibility even in lower level aspects. NT was a relatively clean full 32bit reimplementation.
Was the UI part so cleanly separated to have a chance at that? (Not what my impression was, but I really never dived that deep into Windows.)
After booting it just sat there like “what in C:\>’s name have you done to me?!”
Hahah, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't do equally naive stuff back in the day, I know exactly what your kind of thinking was.
It's almost sad, because understanding takes the magic away. I sort of miss looking at computers with the eyes of a child and wondering what lies behind the abstractions...
When I got home I changed my IP to be a different one on the same subnet and matched the gateway address. I knew what a subnet was, I knew what a router was, but I didn’t realize you can’t just reach any router you want.
I figured if I did that I could get all the stuff that was restricted to the Berkeley network.
Needless to say it didn’t work.
I also had Macs for personal stuff at the time. I remember NT being remarkably stable in comparison to regular Windows, and MacOS of the time. It would run for weeks and weeks without crashing or rebooting. It wasn't sexy, but it worked.