NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
  • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
    531·
    2 months ago
    • preps for bed
    • starts closing apps
    • refreshes lemmy…

    Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

    • *sigh*

    edit: back. a really enjoyable read. loved the POV as unix guy poking at NT. g’night for real now, lemmy.

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 months ago

    Nice to see a pro NT article for a change but there are some details wrong

    “It’s true that Unix has attempted to shoehorn other types of non-file objects into the file system”

    ‘Everything is a file’ was Unix’s design principle from the very start. It wasn’t shoehorned in. It is IMO superior to NT’s object system in that everything is exposed to the user as the file system rather than hidden behind programming api’s.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      Agreed.

      I skimmed through the article, and see no mention of DEC Alpha VMS, which is NT’s predecessor, which is really disappointing. Great read though, very well done.

      DOS and Win3.1 really have little to do with NT. A DEC Alpha team was laid off around 1990, MS hired them, and NT is the result. Mark Minasi (I think, may also have been his partner, who’s name I can’t remember) wrote an article about 1998 in Windows Magazine (NT Magazine?) about it, and broke down the components of both NT and Alpha to demonstrate the similarity.

      I’ve been looking for the article for a couple years now.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Ah, the good old VMS. Did quite some coding on a VAX11/780. Very nice and round OS. NT was basically a VMS clone for Intel. Although I think there was an implementation for the Alpha, too.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      I always thought it was that everything was a file but that everything could be interacted with as if it was a file.

    • exu@feditown.comOPEnglish
      51·
      2 months ago

      I’m not a kernel dev, but I’ve read often enough that there are some places where “everything is a file” somewhat breaks down on Unix. (I think /proc and some /dev)

      For an “absolutely everything is a file” system have a look at plan9, it was the intended successor to Unix, but then that got popular while plan9 stayed a research project.

      • cakeistheanswer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.

        It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.

  • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    243·
    2 months ago

    Moving down the stack, Unix systems have never been big on supporting arbitrary drivers: remember that Unix systems were typically coupled to specific machines and vendors. NT, on the other hand, intended to be an OS for “any” machine and was sold by a software company, so supporting drivers written by others was critical. As a result, NT came with the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), an abstraction to support network card drivers with ease. To this day, manufacturer-supplied drivers are just not a thing on Linux, which leads to interesting contraptions like the ndiswrapper, a very popular shim in the early 2000s to be able to reuse Windows drivers for WiFi cards on Linux.

    • ricdeh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      273·
      2 months ago

      Unix is literally the most important operating system (specification) family on the planet. Even bigger than M$ Windows. You’ve got all the Android phones, all the Apple iPhones, macOS, FreeBSD and all the GNU/Linux distributions. Unix-like installed base is by far the largest of any on the planet.

      • yeehaw@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Don’t forget… The internet basically runs on it too :D

        …and Netflix… And… And… and…

    • anon5621@lemmy.mlEnglish
      191·
      2 months ago

      I think any modern unix-like operation systems: bsd based,linux based,haiku,minix and other else hundred branches.

          • anon5621@lemmy.mlEnglish
            7·
            2 months ago

            Basically mac os and ios is actually same thing both use darwin kernel same graphical stack.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            One of?

            I’m going with the largest, by a huge margin. Unix and it’s descendents run everything. Even MS uses it for some things.

            Unix has been around since 1969-ish, that’s 20 years before NT.

            And I’ve use NT every day since it came out.

            • the_crotch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              11·
              2 months ago

              I don’t consider Linux based os’s Unix, which takes most servers and android out of the running. Unix might still be bigger, idk

    • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      This was most likely posted by a kid who just thinks Unix is “old” Linux and doesn’t understand the roots of what it actually means in terms of computing.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        2 months ago

        I haven’t yet read the article, but it may well be a comparison for which Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris can be united under the Unix umbrella as systems with monolithic kernels and similar conventions. Of course FreeBSD is much cooler than Linux and Solaris is much cooler than FreeBSD, but we get what we get.