On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 9:43 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > Exactly. Back in the 1990s, we had the beginnings of Windows NT, which > was designed for servers. It had (if I recall correctly) no concept of > file/directory permissions, little or no notion of process privilege, > and definitely no way to restrict one process to X amount of memory > and Y amount of processing.
Do you have a name or a link for this system that pre-dates NT? At the time I thought Microsoft only had MS-DOS and OS/2 (and maybe still Xenix?). I know they hired Dave Cutler (the designer of VMS) and several other DEC programmers in late 1988 to develop NT OS/2. It took them 5 years, and along the way the design switched from NT OS/2 to Windows NT (DOS-based Windows had surged in popularity with the release of Windows 3.x, and the business relationship with IBM fell apart). They relegated the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems to the console only, without GUI support (similar to the new Linux subsystem). > Since then, Windows has progressively > added features that Unix has had for decades, because those features > are critical. Those who don't understand Unix are forced to reinvent > it, piece by piece, badly, and then finally rip it out and start > over... NT was designed to run a Unix subsystem and meet U.S. DoD security requirements, so it's naturally going to share a lot of capabilities with Unix. But the similarities are superficial; the design decisions are fundamentally different in many ways. (The differences are more obvious in native NT and kernel development.) No one could say the NT design team was copying Unix. OTOH, how much they pilfered from their previous work on VMS is debatable. IIRC, Microsoft ultimately reached a settlement out of court with DEC on this issue, which was the main reason NT was ported to the DEC Alpha processor in the 90s. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
