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For a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I recommend it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe give freeVMS a try :) It's an old (crazy) friend of mine who did it...
I remember messing around with that ages ago. I wonder if any of the contributors ended up working with VMS Software on the port. It looks, from their site, like they are getting close.
Does it? It looks to me that the last commit was almost five years ago[1].
With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete.
It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition has been reduced to "'Doing Linux' better than linux". Which is to say, "We surrender! There is no plan. Start migrating away from our legacy tech; here is a path."
What's the point in continuing development on and for Windows if it no longer offers (and demands) technological distinctiveness? There is no point.
One of the things that makes this article interesting is the fact that it was written by the current CTO of Microsoft Azure. He wrote extensively about Windows NT back in the day.
Also Mark Russinovich was the author of many life saving SysInternals tools and utilities[0]. He was also the author of the original Windows Internals books. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/
I wonder how relevant the NT kernel is nowadays. My impression is the kernel as a foundation is that it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the windows structures atop it are eternally collapsing and rotted in parts. With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete. It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition h…
Adding Linux features is just more cruft added to the kludge. Sells more units, particularly in Azure, not particularly part of some sort of strategic direction then, say, the Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
The UI and OS-level shovelware stuff on the other hand is a nightmare that might kill the not-quite-golden-anymore goose.
I wonder how relevant the NT kernel is nowadays. My impression is the kernel as a foundation is that it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the windows structures atop it are eternally collapsing and rotted in parts. With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete. It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition h…
Sure, Win32 is a beast now past retirement, and Microsoft has been trying to help that retirement happen sooner rather than later with UWP, but again, that seems a testament to the underlying NT kernel, because the NT kernel doesn't care, it's still chugging along doing its thing and doing it well. It's also running on more hardware combinations and more processor architectures than most other kernels could dream of touching.
For a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I recommend it.
If you're interested in the design and implemention of the NT kernel, check out David Solomon's Inside Windows NT . The book's technical level is roughly at that of an undergraduate class on operating systems, going a little deeper than this article.
I wonder how relevant the NT kernel is nowadays. My impression is the kernel as a foundation is that it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the windows structures atop it are eternally collapsing and rotted in parts. With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete. It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition h…
It seems just the opposite to me. The Windows Subsystem for Linux seems a testament to the NT Kernel and its deliberate approach from nearly three decades ago. Designed originally to support Win32, POSIX, and OS/2 frontends, for a long time it only ever really needed to exercise one of those things. Now it has the best POSIX layer it has ever had, focusing on byte-for-byte compatibility with binaries targeting the Li…
Right... There's another reason why it was originally called OS/2 NT: IBM had hired Microsoft to co-develop OS/2 with them before Windows NT development had begun (as early as 1985). The reason for a resemblence to OS/2 with the name and API compatibility would seem to be so that Microsoft could develop the NT product as "OS/2" which could be charged back to IBM. So, effectively, IBM was unknowingly paying for a chunk of NT development. By the time IBM realized they were getting worked over it was too late, they had already been taken for a ride by Microsoft. They lost in two ways: they lost the the desktop market to Windows which shipped pre-installed on nearly all consumer PC's, and paying for dev work on OS/2 1.3 which really was going into NT product). So IBM took OS/2 development back in-house in 1990 and licked their wounds, but it was too late by then. Except for the embedded market, OS/2 had lost.