51–60 of 79 posts
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.
It was great, stable, and ran Windows and DOS apps in emulation (sort of like DEC's FX!32 for NT/Alpha).
Per Microsoft: "On RISC-based computers, Windows NT provides a 486 emulator that runs applications designed for 286, 386, or higher processors."
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Do you remember any details from Cutler Normal Form? I'd love to learn more about this. From a quick search I see that it uses braces at the end. I'd be curious if CNF encouraged subsystem prefixes (e.g. the "Ke" in "KeBugCheck"). I wonder if CNF had any influence on "Systems Hungarian" (e.g. "dwCreationFlags") that dominates the Win32 API or if that came as an accidental offshoot of Simonyi's "Application Hungarian"
I don't remember much hungarian in CNF, I do remember a lot of whitespace... // // Comments are always surrounded both by empty comment lines // And by whitespace // // // The return type is always on its own line. // The function name always starts at column 0 and is whitespace delimited, // this (allegedly) was a consequence of search macros that Cutler used // int main ( int argc, char **argv) { // // Even a one l…
Regarding placement of curly braces, did you see them on their own line or at the end? This article seems to imply that CNF had braces at the end: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/peterwie/2008/02/04/pedanti...
I'm interested because it seems that lower-level systems programming at Microsoft put braces at the end (early .NET BCL, maybe even the first C# compiler's C++ code, TypeScript compiler source, etc), but that Microsoft documentation tended to put braces on their own line and then that became the more de-facto style that shows up in their open source code.
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?
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah...
I'd pay good money for a digitized copy. I wonder if there are any legal or Microsoft barriers to that happening someday.
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I just started reading this book, maybe half way through, it's very interesting! Some of the technical analogies are a little weak, but all the quotes and anecdotes are great.
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…
By mid 1993 it was already on the 3rd version (running on a Motorola 68040 no less) and was already doing everything that NT could.
I really love watching the old NeXT presentations on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07Xjom_GQA
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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.
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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…
And then Microsoft screwed up NT, over Cutler's objections, by putting in crap code from Windows 95 to make it "compatible" with programs that relied on quirks of Windows 95. It took many years to clean up that mess. (I started with Windows NT 3.51, which was a very nice system. The 16-bit emulation module was entirely optional, and I configured it off. Worked fine, as long as you bought applications certified for NT…