zlacker

>>lostms+(OP)
The story reminds me of Andy Hertzfeld’s Switcher:

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.

>>pavlov+7b
I love how those stories of the early years are so different from what I think of looking at companies today -

> 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.

>>yjftsj+df
Windows NT is designed out of the box for extending and embracing Unix. The whole Linux Subsystem thing isn't something new that required deep reworking of the kernel.

>>sansno+Ok
You should read the book Showstopper! to learn that NT was actually designed to be as far away from Unix as it could be. Dave Cutler, NT’s chief architect, hated Unix with a passion. He thought it was a rubbish OS. The internals are based on VMS, Cutler’s previous OS. That’s why NT has never been a good posix system and why microsoft has essentially given up with WSL2 and is now just running linux in a vm.

>>Joeri+oK
Great book. Another interesting wrinkle that’s been somewhat lost to time is that (as the book documents) NT was developed simultaneously on x86 and a RISC architecture (MIPS I believe).