They said the same things about NT in 1992/93
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| phsolide Jul 28, 2005 5:55 AM EDT |
I hardly need mention this, except that corporate america has the attention span of a gnat... MSFT and its paid for media shills said almost exactly the same things about Windows NT back in 1992-1994. "Best designed OS ever", "secure from the start", "no buffer overflows", blah blah yadda yadda. They lied back then, and they lie right now. I can barely express my massive dismay at seeing this kind of "industry trend"/"best practices" article on NewsForge, the "paper of record for LINUX". Industry trends don't always make sense (DCE in 1995, MSFT's CLR now). Why did MSFT even "invent" C# in the first place? Because Sun won a lawsuit to keep MSFT from "fracturing" Java in the first place. Microsoft Sucks - don't try to soft peddle it, acknowledge what we all know, and let us get on with life, and making things better. |
| dinotrac Jul 28, 2005 9:19 AM EDT |
To be fair, NT was pretty decent when it first came out. It was designed by the crew who built VMS for DEC and reflected a lot of that heritage. However ... people deemed it "not snappy" (among other things), and changes were made -- primarily to move graphic rendering into the kernel -- that significantly compromised its stability and secuirty. |
| phsolide Jul 28, 2005 12:41 PM EDT |
I have to beg to differ. NT never was "pretty decent". In retrospect, early NT versions more clearly resembled Mach 2.0 than VMS, despite the presence of Dave Cutler, Marc Lukovsky and others, and the *remarkable resemblance* of NTFS to ODS-11. I expect that Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" (1st Edition) was more of a vision of what NT should have been than what it was. As far as "not snappy" - people who actually measured performance (like some Harvard folks here: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~yaz/p5.html ) found a factor of 2 to 7 performance hit for using NT vs NetBSD, a not particularly x86-tuned Unix. Except in graphics of course. Everyone needs to quit giving MSFT any respect for NT: although it may have started out influenced by Mach or VAXELN or VMS or Micah, MSFT never allowed architectural purity. It's design became rapidly polluted by backwards compatibility and quick hacks that became standards. Paying lip service to NT just isn't meritorious. It sucked then, and it hasn't gotten any better. If anyone other than MSFT had put NT on the marketplace, it wouldn't even be remembered as fondly as OS/2 is. It would have died a quick, ignoble Bob-like death. |
| Abe Jul 28, 2005 6:30 PM EDT |
phsolide:
You are entitled to your opinion but the people who designed and developed NT all were Digital engineers. Dave Cutler and his group (~200 people) were located in Digital research facility some where close to Seatle. They, for a while, were working on MicroVMS (for a PC like computer) and Digital was going to drop it in favor of the Alpha. MS grabbed the chance and hired them all. If you have dealt with VMS & NT Internals like I did, you will see the similarities. I recall back then Digital engineers were able to find comments in 1st release of NT and they were going to sue MS but eventually it was settle out of court. Part of the agreement was MS to support the Alpha by having a Winodws version. I ran those systems in cluster mode, which was Digital develped and marketed for a while but later was purchased by MS and I ran this too for a few years. Any ways, here are couple links for you to ponder on. http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=449... http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/Windows-NT_is_VMS_re-i... |
| phsolide Jul 29, 2005 7:16 AM EDT |
NT's heritage, whether derived from Cutler's imagination, VMS, MicroVMS, Mach, Emerald, Micah or a plain brown package with a Schenectady postmark, is immaterial. Thank you Abe, for the "Windows NT is VMS-reimplemented" link - fascinating stuff. The heritage is immaterial - MSFT (and media shills) did a good deal of spinning of NT in 1992-94. Networking wasn't built in from the start, the security model kind of sucked. See Pascal Zachary's "Show Stopper", and subsequent real-world experience with NT. Paying any kind of respectful lip-service to NT is not meritorious. |
| Abe Jul 29, 2005 9:38 AM EDT |
Phsolide: You are right, heritage is immaterial. NT was never any of the systems it was copied from. MS couldn't copy everything otherwise they would have been in deep trouble. MS basically bastardized all of those systems. Relatively speaking, they took relaible, robust, scalable workhorse server OS that was the best in the technology and made a shoddy OS. MS basically had to have a quick start to get into the server market. Win 95 and 98 were single user single task OS although they faked them to look like they are not. The things that MS added to NT made it outrageously bad, but it was a big progress for them from 95/98 and people were ecstatic about it since they didn't know any better. With all the lackey journalists and MS marketing, they made it look like it is the best thing since sliced bread. MS never had any good technical innovations, they always stole ideas and did an excellent job on marketing them. I myself would have never used NT for business or engineering apps, but MS marketing got to the best of the CIOs and NT flourished, not because of its technical merits, but because of marketing. NT looked like it is cheaper than others, but when you count everything it wasn't. It was basically pay me know or pay me later. Companies paid little to start with, but many times ended up paying more afterwards. What a shame, they still succeed even today. |
| AnonymousCoward Jul 31, 2005 5:27 AM EDT |
Nice collection of rants! A round of applause, please, for Abe and phsolide! |
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