Why wasn't Windows built on top of Unix? | One Dev Question with Larry Osterman
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2021
- A new video from Larry Osterman, Principal Software Design Engineer:
Hey Larry, why wasn't Windows built on top of Unix? Thankfully, you can learn more about both #Windows and #Unix/#Linux programming on MicrosoftLearn (docs.microsoft.com/learn/?WT..... 
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Fun fact: Dave Cutler, the chief architect of Windows NT, had an immense dislike of Unix. "Unix is like Cutler's lifelong foe. It's like his Moriarty. He thinks Unix is a junk operating program designed by a committee of PhDs. There's never been one mind behind the whole thing, and it shows. So he's always been out to get Unix."
Dave Cutler was one of a whole nest of Unix haters at DEC, right up to the top guy at the time, Ken Olsen.
He took his Unix hate with him to Microsoft, and built it so thoroughly into Windows NT that Microsoft is still paying the price today. Single-letter drive names? Really? And that’s why WSL1 was tried and failed, and why WSL2 with an actual Linux kernel had to be brought in, currently as an optional install, but it’s inevitable it’ll become mandatory at some point.
Dave Cutler was one of a whole nest of Unix haters at DEC, right up to the top guy at the time, Ken Olsen.
"there's never been one mind behind the whole thing and it shows" can be applied to another extremely popular OS on the market today as well
Speaking of minds behind operating systems, I can't wait for AI to design an operating system. That would be great. Maybe it can make one that doesn't suck.
I think we need a far bigger exploration of this topic. I get that Dave Cutler was brought in to lead the development of NT and that he hated Unix. The story essentially ends right there I guess, but the criticisms of Unix' security model and scalability I find pretty odd. Unix (and now Linux) has been the foundation of some of the most scalable systems on the planet for decades. And the security model may be simple but it's also pretty robust, especially in comparison to the complexity and Swiss cheese that is Windows.
The failiure of XENIX is pretty much the cause here.
XENIX was Microsoft's UNIX, however, at that time UNIX developers bought licenses from bell labs to develop it, however, as XENIX was finishing its development time, Bell Labs announced that they would enter the unix market themselves, Microsoft thought they couldnt compete, and XENIX development was yanked, and microsoft moved their full focus to DOS and later to the NT kernel
Says that UNIX was Limited and didn't have total access control (NOT)
Windows: *Does the same*
Can't help but think that are just coping over the fact that they couldn't build a proper UNIX of their own.
They couldn't SELL unix as their own..
@@electricalstuff259 Yep. XENIX was a fuck up.
You had SystemV, the bad SystemV (XENIX) and then the cool SystemV (Solaris)
Windows was built on DOS, an IBM mainframe OS. UNIX OS was a competitor. NT was tied closely to IBM's multi user platforms, because the code base was similar. In fact, little known secret; comdex 94 windows 🪟 4/NT failed to boot so they ran it on a WARP OS invisible to the crowd
Seems difficult to explain, moreover in a short video
With some respect to Larry Osterman for the work on the CLR and COM things (which are actually nice designs), this must either be an April fool's joke (but was not uploaded April 1st?) or is an attempt of fake news corporate history rewriting/retelling. You don't get to choose to "your" Windows being NT. The real question should be, why was Windows built on top of (and retained and later emulated/emulates) MS-DOS (former IBM-/PC-DOS, former "Q&D" 86-DOS, a poor clone of CP/M; also none of these in the abandoned OS/2), instead of a proper development from scratch? So with actual history, you get: Windows not having any noteworthy security at all while UNIX had some for quite some time. One main reason that UNIX wasn't a viable option is probably neither Bill Gates nor IBM would have gotten a cheap UNIX license from AT&T, and IBM wanted to get into the microcomputer market quickly and on the cheap. That's why Windows later didn't have some Unix to use as a base.
NT, being late, probably took some inspirations, especially on security (vs. Windows previously not having much) from Unix, like, that it might be a good idea to support multiuser, maybe not log in as Administrator/root, maybe protect system files. Took Windows forever to adopt that, from the other more advanced operating systems, like Unix-likes. And all this despite with Windows, it's usually just one user sitting in front of their single computer anyway, not doing any multiuser/timesharing stuff in terms of multiple users using the same machine at the same time, and accounts and things are offloaded into Active Directory anyway, so is a question if that's even a real feature on the operating system level, or just an integration with network services. "Enterprise", bwahaha!
Enterprise scalable operating system? I really hope you are joking.
Makes sense, the proper question would be "why Windows 11* wasn't built on top of unix or linux?"
Linux didn't exist in 1989.
@@billysherman2702
Yeah, Windows 11 exists back then.
Two things:
1. Backwards compatibility
2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Windows NT is very robust and works just fine for almost everyone. Swapping to another kernel/architecture will only cause problems
I'm sorry to disappoint you but the Windows Kernel has a lot of things that are technically better than the Linux Kernel.
@@llothar68
KEK! I see what you did there!
Anyone else notice there was no elaboration? Because there _ISN'T_ anything better in the Windows kernel, so nothing to elaborate on!
GOODONE, brah!
0:26 Ok, so stop right there. Yes up until that time all the microcomputers with few exceptions lacked memory management/protection. That's pretty much the foundational feature of Unix and is the basis for it's multitasking, user management, concurrency and so on. You don't have that, you don't have Unix. So in 1989, 386s had JUST come down to where they were reasonably affordable for most people and 486s had just come out. 286 and 8086 didn't have MMUs. This is the main reason why we didn't see something like the Linux project earlier than we did. Linus started it for his 386 as the target architecture. Now you did have stuff targeted to minis, but that's completely different. Zilog z8000 Unix port for example. Those still aren't what you'd consider a "personal computer" or microcomputer though.
It was because at the time a Unix license was $160,000 per CPU, and they'd already gone to all the effort of ripping off Gary Kildare's CP-M. 🤣
If they knew the truth about the Alto incident.. regardless, UNIX is an eventuality. Everything produced by Linux community automatically gets soaked up by UNIX, namely FreeBSD. Whatever is created for all the Linux distros, FreeBSD absorbs it, becoming almighty and all powerful.
😂 Except Graphics Drivers which makes it impossible to run the BSD's as modern desktops.
Even Microsoft runs all of their servers on Linux!
When Microsoft says UNIXs security model had issues Ads someone who worked as a PC tech in the early 2000's I have to laugh At the mess that was XP's complete and utter lack of security.
those were some fun days to be a hacker
The answer is: "We knew we needed for the marketplace". They needed it to make money which was not possible for them from Unix the way they needed.
This doesn't answer the question at all. Modern Linux and other UNIX-like OS's obviously have ACL's and run on virtually all of the world's supercomputers, not to mention 90% of web servers and a majority of servers running on Microsoft Azure. I think a more honest answer is that Dave Cutler was simply more familiar with VMS and chose to build on his experience with that OS.
windows hyperscale cloud operating system? is he joking?
This is joke right? So funny
Love?
Everyone hates windows
Lol, security in Windows… 🤣 almost fell off my chair
If windows Built with UNIX, i bet gaming on PC never happen. imagine a world where you can only buy Playstation for game MacOS for compute and iOS for communicating. No windows or Linux allowed.
This is nonsense. Windows was originally built on DOS. There was no security model. NT was built by Cutler who came from DEC VMS so he built it from what he knew. MS could have gone down the Unix route with NT but they chose not to probably for commercial reasons. Hence the situation now where Linux is superior even if Windows has pointless eye candy.
Yeah, the title says "why windows" but his answer was "why NT." NT didn't show up until '93, not '89. He may be right that UNIX security at the time wasn't good enough for what they wanted to make, so they built NT instead, but NT and consumer Windows didn't merge until XP in 2003, and even that is a joke for security and access control by today's standards.
As always, the true reasons were almost certainly commercial. They wanted something that they could own outright and creating their own OS was the way to do it. They had already shown their monopolistic tendencies in desktop (DOS based) Windows all throughout the '90s, why would the enterprise be any different?
Couldn't have said it better myself even if I tried \o/
@@drumguy1384 Perhaps when he mentioned 1989 this was when the team started working on the NT system which was then released in 1993 - 4 years to start fresh as it were. I think the problem they face now is if they converted Win 10/11 to UNIX the existing software wouldn’t be compatible and that would be a major issue for corporations and consumers (although less so for consumers).
@@martyp2138 Much of the hard work is already done, if they wanted to swap to a Unix or Linux kernel. They could fork WINE or Proton, and make some patches. But that wouldn't be the Microsoft way.
I agree, clearly the guy who was actually there knows less than you, a random youtube commenter who just skimmed the wikipedia page.
Brilliant job explaining this question Larry!!
Coz windows didn't like OSS back then.
0 comments? Lmao what?
that's why you missed the smartphone revolution, and now rely on a unix OS to make yourself in (android) ;)
Windows was then, and is now ... shit.
😀 That is harsh. The masses needed an easy to work with OS too. There was not much around that was friendly early on, except for Mac.
#LoveMicrosoft❤
Do a search for 'Scalability Day'. This man has no understanding of history.
Windows "state of the art operating system" LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!