Windows Longhorn and the Worst Code I've Ever Seen: Dave Cutler [video] | Hacker News Reader

Windows Longhorn and the Worst Code I've Ever Seen: Dave Cutler [video]

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59 pointsneom17 comments

I thought this was interesting because I remember that period very well, everyone upgraded to XP and I kept running 2000 (ran NT 4.0 before that) because I thought it was rock solid. XP seemed slow and buggy. It's interesting to hear that was indeed a more stable windows distro run by a distinctly different team.

Side note, Jim Allchin seems like a really cool dude: https://jimallchin.com/about / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin

Win2k was where it was at. I miss that OS. Maybe it is rose tinted glasses ... But yeah it was sooooo much better than xp. I remember people using the beta for longhorn and there was perf loss from just using it....

It was a great OS, NT 4.0 with the rough edges smoothed off.

I stayed with it as long as I could.

Windows 2000 is some kind of apex in the Windows OS abstract space. I remember being in the beta programme back in the second half of 1999 and being amazed at how solid it was even then. (I was a home user but I’d been bitten by the BeOS bug so I had a dual PIII-450 system, and since I had then-newfangled USB ports that NT 4.0 didn’t support I was virtually compelled to adopt 2k even in its unfinished state if I wanted to run Windows apps and partake of the SMP facilities.)

I still maintain that Windows 2000 was the best version of Windows. It was lean enough that it ran on older hardware, used the more secure NT kernel, lacked the XP bloat, was user friendly for most users, and didn't include a bunch of unused crapware.

Nowadays my latest laptop came with Windows 11 pre-installed. It loads up, logs in, connects to the network and shows the desktop background. That consumes 5GB of RAM and 27GB of HD space. Windows 2000 did the same in 64MB of RAM and 1.2GB of HD space.

Anyway, I've replaced WIndows 11 with Linux, and booting to my desktop consumes 800MB of RAM

Great respect to a man, too, who has the restraint to distill his memoirs and lessons learned into a single page.

Imagine Dave Cutler calling your project "Windows Doesn't Matterhorn". That's brutal.

Edit: Downvote Dave, not me! I'm not the one who said it.

Apparently, that's what everyone was calling it outside of the longhorn group...

Wow. Those older memes about the Microsoft org chart looking like a circular firing squad weren’t kidding.

He actually says “the worst code I probably looked at” in the context of fixing bugs for Win XP SP3, referring specifically to the Japanese IME code. Not “the worst code I’ve ever seen”, and not even specifically Longhorn code.

We need an Oxford comma for a two item list.

7m40sec

The comment is made around 8m08s, but you'll want to start watching at 7m40sec to have context.

Dave Cutler is a legend. I heard that Microsoft ran out of titles to give him and had to create more senior titles for him.

This is off topic but what’s that funky synth looking thing over his shoulder to his left?

I'm not certain, but I want to say it is a mock-PDP-8 control panel.

I think it's a PiDP-11, the PiDP-8 isn't quite as red.

Has anyone resurrected WinFS yet?

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