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From: Nick Maclaren on 15 Aug 2008 09:52

In article <g83sf4$t2r$1(a)s1.news.oleane.net>,
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?= <Jan.Vorbrueggen(a)not-thomson.net> writes:
|>
|> > That's not what happened. They hired David Cutler from DEC, where he
|> > had worked on VMS, and pretty much left him alone. The chaos was and
|> > is part of the culture of modern programming.
|>
|> His work was significantly more disciplined when he worked for DEC than
|> what was the result from Redmond. But he didn't have a choice: Backward
|> compatibility, bug for bug and misfeature for misfeature, rule(d|s)
|> supreme in the Windows realm.

Oh, it was worse than that! After he had done the initial design
(which was reasonable, if not excellent), he was elbowed out, and
half of his design was thrown out to placate the god Benchmarketing.

The aspect that I remember was that the GUI was brought back from
where he had exiled it to the 'kernel' - and, as we all know, the
GUIs are the source of all ills on modern systems :-(


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
From: Chris M. Thomasson on 15 Aug 2008 10:38

"Jan Vorbr�ggen" <Jan.Vorbrueggen(a)not-thomson.net> wrote in message
news:g83sf4$t2r$1(a)s1.news.oleane.net...
>> That's not what happened. They hired David Cutler from DEC, where he
>> had worked on VMS, and pretty much left him alone. The chaos was and
>> is part of the culture of modern programming.
>
> His work was significantly more disciplined when he worked for DEC than
> what was the result from Redmond.






> But he didn't have a choice: Backward compatibility, bug for bug and
> misfeature for misfeature, rule(d|s) supreme in the Windows realm.

;^(...

From: John Larkin on 15 Aug 2008 10:47
On 15 Aug 2008 13:52:54 GMT, nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote:

>
>In article <g83sf4$t2r$1(a)s1.news.oleane.net>,
>=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?= <Jan.Vorbrueggen(a)not-thomson.net> writes:
>|>
>|> > That's not what happened. They hired David Cutler from DEC, where he
>|> > had worked on VMS, and pretty much left him alone. The chaos was and
>|> > is part of the culture of modern programming.
>|>
>|> His work was significantly more disciplined when he worked for DEC than
>|> what was the result from Redmond. But he didn't have a choice: Backward
>|> compatibility, bug for bug and misfeature for misfeature, rule(d|s)
>|> supreme in the Windows realm.


They had special flags for running specific applications that tuned
the API bug set so the major apps could still run.


>
>Oh, it was worse than that! After he had done the initial design
>(which was reasonable, if not excellent), he was elbowed out, and
>half of his design was thrown out to placate the god Benchmarketing.
>
>The aspect that I remember was that the GUI was brought back from
>where he had exiled it to the 'kernel' - and, as we all know, the
>GUIs are the source of all ills on modern systems :-(
>
>

That did confuse me a little. The book has him holding out, against
Gates even, for a small kernel with a client-server relationship to
everything else, including all the graphics. The story ends happily
there, with nothing left to do but fix the circa 1000 bugs initially
shipped. I suppose the kernel was trashed/bloated later in the name of
speed.


John


From: Nick Maclaren on 15 Aug 2008 10:56

In article <eb5ba4h9kn5mbudqf4cg8o9jtpduk1hp3i(a)4ax.com>,
John Larkin <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> writes:
|>
|> That did confuse me a little. The book has him holding out, against
|> Gates even, for a small kernel with a client-server relationship to
|> everything else, including all the graphics. The story ends happily
|> there, with nothing left to do but fix the circa 1000 bugs initially
|> shipped. I suppose the kernel was trashed/bloated later in the name of
|> speed.

Right in one - at least according to my understanding!

I read the book, and felt that is was a significant advance, though
not as far as the best of the research systems (e.g. the Cambridge
CHAOS system on CAP).


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
From: Jan Vorbrüggen on 15 Aug 2008 12:42
> Oh, it was worse than that! After he had done the initial design
> (which was reasonable, if not excellent), he was elbowed out, and
> half of his design was thrown out to placate the god Benchmarketing.
>
> The aspect that I remember was that the GUI was brought back from
> where he had exiled it to the 'kernel' - and, as we all know, the
> GUIs are the source of all ills on modern systems :-(

Yep - I think that was part of the 3.51 to 4.0 transition. As I
understand it, the thing was just too resource-hungry for the hardware
of the day to be marketable in that state.

But in addition, there were things like not checking syscall arguments
in the kernel - something the VMS guys had been religous about. It was
only after people came out with a CRASHME variant that MS was shamed
into fixing those, for instance. That really shows their lack of discipline.

Jan
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