On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 9:28 AM Man-wai Chang changmw@gmail.com wrote:
Which means Micro$oft might need to rewrite it again? ;)
Well, they bought DOS, slapped a gui on it, sold that for nearly 20 years, moving it from 16- to 32-bit, yay Win32s!
Windows, 2.0, 3.1, 3.1, 3.11, W4Workgroups, W4Tablets, w4Work, Win95, 98, Millenium
They teamed up with IBM to write OS/2 later "WARP," using Windows New Technology with the New Technology File System.
Then they torpedoed IBM and released it as Windows NT. And that's what we are running today, Windows NT 3, 3.5, 3.51, 4, 7, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10. They've glommed a lot of stuff on top, but it's Windows NT on NTFS with its lousy security model, patched over with a new domain model and Policy enforcement, but it's the Registry and LAN Man and the same old print queue.
It's tens of millions of lines of code, written mostly by people who don't work there any more. It's huge, it's heavy, it's buggy. And it runs on Desktops. And Servers. And not much else. Not smartphones, not lightweight tables, not the internet. Ignoring Windows CE (which still exists, running my settop box -*shudder), WindowsPhone, and XBox OS, all speciality spinoffs.
Perhaps they should rewrite it. Third time's the charm, or so they mythology goes within MS.
Highly recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows for a refresher on the history. Good overview.