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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

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Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#31

Post by frik »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #13
mapgrep wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree. It's also a fascinating window into what an achievement Windows NT was, and I say that as someone who does not use Windows anywhere. By mid 1993 Dave Cutler and his team released a multi-threaded, pre-emptive multi tasking pure 32 bit version of Windows that supported the Windows API and worked across three different hardware architectures (two of which were pure RISC processors). Apple, often lauded fo…

Not to detract from the achievement, but the transition to NT wasn't quite as rosy at that. It took many years for apps written for Windows 3.x/95/98/etc. to catch up and run correctly on NT. In the early years, app and game producers had a distinct bias in favour of Win9x (popular consumer OS) and to the detriment of NT (esoteric, less shiny business/server OS). The game compatibility situation, in particular, was q…

> The game compatibility situation, in particular, was quite miserable

Win 2000 already supported DX8 and most games worked fine. The step to WinXP was very small (and for games interesting: DX9 and "compatibility mode" shims). Only the setup routines were sometimes a problem because they checked for Win9x or even actively detected WinNT and aborted.

Though many with low end hardware got bad performance, that was the problem. Win95 required 4MB memory. Win98 16MB. WinME 32 MB. People with an old PC tried WinNT4/2000/XP and it run slow, no wonder.

The NT line was viewed as a resource hog and viewed as over-architecture with a HAL and Win32 running as sub-systems. In 1996 WinNT 4 already needed 32 MB. And Win 2000 128 MB. (I had a notebook with Win2000 with just 128MB and it wasn't flying, it barely run.) WinXP was also viewed as a resource hog by doubling the memory requirement within 1 1/2 years to 256MB as minimum requirement, only with 512MB it run really fine. (I bought a new PC with 512MB in 2001 and never looked back to Win9x DOS based Windows line. 99% of all games worked just fine, and for the rest there was Dosbox/Bochs/Quemu/VMware.)

I wish one could buy a Win10 build that comes with Win10 kernel, the Win2000 shell and no spying & tracking crap. A modern OS still could be very fast and consume a lot less hardware resources.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#32

Post by StillBored »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #13
mapgrep wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree. It's also a fascinating window into what an achievement Windows NT was, and I say that as someone who does not use Windows anywhere. By mid 1993 Dave Cutler and his team released a multi-threaded, pre-emptive multi tasking pure 32 bit version of Windows that supported the Windows API and worked across three different hardware architectures (two of which were pure RISC processors). Apple, often lauded fo…

Not to detract from the achievement, but the transition to NT wasn't quite as rosy at that. It took many years for apps written for Windows 3.x/95/98/etc. to catch up and run correctly on NT. In the early years, app and game producers had a distinct bias in favour of Win9x (popular consumer OS) and to the detriment of NT (esoteric, less shiny business/server OS). The game compatibility situation, in particular, was q…

I had a run of dual core machines starting in the mid 90's and moved most of my work/etc to NT around NT 3.51 (games and such were still on win9x). Knowing that one of my cores wasn't in use in 9x was a pretty strong motivator to boot back to NT. Especially for dev purposes.

That said, I too had issues with the beta's of NT 3.1. But that didn't stop us from moving all our products/etc to NT, with our first commercial sales/installs of a 32-bit clean server application in early 1994. In late '94 another company wanted us to port our wares to a high availability solaris, and I started down that path, and the project got canned when it became apparent that the HA hardware only ran an older version of sunos/solaris that didn't support threads, and our application's core was built around multithreading.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#33

Post by frik »

moserware wrote: post #3

Dave Cutler is a legend, but he keeps a relatively low profile, so it was nice to watch the rare new video interview with him at the bottom. I especially liked what he said at the end: "I have this little saying that the successful people in the world are the people that do the things that the unsuccessful ones won't. So I've always been this person that, you know.. I will build the system, I will fix the bugs, I wil…

Show Stopper is a great book. And Dave Cutler is a very unique person.

If you want to learn more about the WinNT kernel and Windows operating system in general, go no further than have a look at the compatible implementation (open source):

http://reactos.org

(similar to what Linux is to Unix, ReactOS is to WinNT series)

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#34

Post by oldsj »

cm3 wrote: post #21
hga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core NT is, or at least was, prior to NT 4 putting graphics in the kernel, very very nice. It's mostly what Microsoft did on top of it, and their general stewardship of it that I have a problem with. For the latter, I noticed a serious drop in quality starting with 3.51 SP2, which to the best of my ability on Google seems to have come out 9 months before NT 4.

Exactly. Windows 8 and 10 include substantial improvements to the underpinnings that would be worth the switch from Windows 7 if Microsoft didn't basically kill the UI. This stupid desire to change stuff for a new version, as done with cars, does nobody good. - 3D widgets serve a purpose and make it much easier to see what's a widget and what's not - Windows XP theme engine was great and it got killed in Windows 7 -…

Having switched to windows 10 after using OSX and Linux primarily for the past 10 years or so, I have to say its been fine for me. The UI is simple: hit the windows key and type the name of the program you want to launch. Switch virtual desktops with ctrl+win left/right. Snap windows to the left or right with win+left/right. And now, its actually usable for dev with the subsystem for linux feature.

Oh and by the way games just work, chrome just works, spotify just works, intellij just works and all of this can be installed from the cli with chocolatey.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#35

Post by noir_lord »

moserware wrote: post #3

Dave Cutler is a legend, but he keeps a relatively low profile, so it was nice to watch the rare new video interview with him at the bottom. I especially liked what he said at the end: "I have this little saying that the successful people in the world are the people that do the things that the unsuccessful ones won't. So I've always been this person that, you know.. I will build the system, I will fix the bugs, I wil…

Which video interview is that quote from?

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#36

Post by bmalicoat »

When I was working on Xbox One, I got all the checkin mails. Whenever I had time, I'd look for Dave's changes and see what he did. Nearly all of them were over my head because they were so deep in the OS. The ones I understood were usually fixing other people's bugs or build breaks like he mentions in the video. It was definitely a highlight to see the actual work of someone so disciplined and dedicated to their craft.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#37

Post by barkingcat »

b1gFanOfVMS wrote: post #2

I can only imagine the hate this guys going to get here for NT...but I'm a huge fan. One of mt first jobs was running a VMS cluster...then went on to work with Windows. Enjoyed it all. Dave Cutler is brilliant. Thanks Dave!

No hate. Dave Cutler is the real deal with a long line of successful and groundbreaking systems. NT kernel is the work of a pro.

Why do you imagine that technical people will look down on him despite groundbreaking innovations and steady decades worth of work going back to VMS? That's hardcore on a level only reached by a few, and only those also mentioned in the article - Alan Kay, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, are equals to Dave Cutler.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#38

Post by EvanAnderson »

phodo wrote: post #28

Little known factoid: When Cutler came to MS, and worked on NT, he added a cool VMS easter egg in the name WinNT: W --> -1 --> V N --> -1 --> M T --> -1 --> S VMS is/was a great OS. I was fortunate enough to work on it on a satellite communication system straight out of college. I recall adding the the TCP/IP drivers and achieving connectivity across large Wide Area Networks and setting up one of the first wireless I…

The Wikipedia article for Windows NT references this, but also references a statement from Mark Lucovsky stating that the original target for NT, the i860 processor, was codenamed "N-Ten" and that the "NT" name came from the target processor.

It would mildly be interesting to get confirmation of the real source.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#39

Post by bediger4000 »

dursk wrote: post #25
vox_mollis wrote: post #10

Dave Cutler is my personal aspirational model. When I am 70, I want to still be writing production code, rather than languishing in middle management. Engineers who choose to "trade up" to management will always baffle me.

Would you prefer to have a manager who wasn't an engineer previously?

I would like to be offered the choice. That is, most managers come from "the business" or something, and have never been an engineer, and don't want to have been an engineer. Given a choice, I'd pick the manager that was an engineer, but those folks are pretty rare.

Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

#40

Post by yuhong »

Intermernet wrote: post #23
Maarten88 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran the very first beta of Windows NT and it was glorious. I had never before experienced anything like it: you could compile and run your C code in a graphical debugger, and it would catch bad pointer errors by breaking the program right were the bug was. Fix, recompile, rerun. 16 bit Windows computers would crash reboot on errors like that, leaving you with the printf errorlog to find the bug. Sun and Silicon Gra…

The only thing that (IMO) came close was OS/2. I really wish Warp had beaten Windows 95. It was astounding. The kicker was that the Windows VM in OS/2 was, in some ways, actually more stable than the native apps [1]. > Ironically, if you never ran native OS/2 applications and just ran DOS and Windows apps in a VM, the operating system was much more stable. [1]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operatin…

That OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topic, with NT originally being "NT OS/2". I have a bad opinion of it.
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