https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
The difference is that, in 1984, Bill Gates immediately offered $40k and Steve Jobs offered $100k for plugging a hole in their operating system.
In 2020, Microsoft just strings you along on vague promises while they simultaneously rip you off.
> Jeff picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Microsoft's main building where we were joined by Neil Konzen, a talented 23 year old who was Microsoft's main systems programmer on the Macintosh. I knew Neil from his days as an early Apple II hobbyist, when we collaborated on adding features to an assembly language development system when he was only 16.
Just... "Microsoft's main systems programmer on the Macintosh" is such a weird sentence to read today. On the other hand, Microsoft also shipped Xenix, a full-on licensed Unix™ OS before they shipped DOS.
When you use it, you get a nice Korn shell and it is built on PE binaries linked against PSDLL.DLL. there's a functioning but very old version of GCC that ships with it.
The PE binaries mark up the desired subsystem to be invoked so you don't have to be in the environment to execute one - the kernel takes over.
PSDLL acts as a translation layer for NT much as kernel32 does for win32. You can't run unmodified Linux binaries like you can with wsl. On the other hand, WSL requires that you invoke lxss with some special com magic to get access to Linux first so you can't just exec an elf file directly. The Pico processes you mentioned - these allow the kernel to install specific handlers/translators of their syscall functionality into the windows kernel.
So yeah architecturally they're pretty different and WSL isn't really the same subsystem concept they started with. On the other hand it that's probably a good thing because everything needed a rebuild for SUA.