> <i>Cutler goes to great lengths to prevent people from optimizing for x86 in the early development of NT, despite the intense pressure to do so for performance reasons. He intuitively knew that sacrificing portability this early would cripple the future design of the OS.</i><p>Is that so? Yet, no version of Windows has run on anything big endian.<p>Linus Torvalds started Linux in a way that was totally geared toward 386. He used the 80368 memory segments of all things: the descriptor tables and all!<p>Some of the 386-isms survived in some of the naming, like get_fs (named after the FS register):<p><a href="https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-short-for-in-kernel-function-get-fs" rel="nofollow">https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-s...</a><p>None of that stopped Linux from running on all sorts of stuff.
One of my favorite quotes (forget who said it...) from the archives of the plan9 mailing list was someone frustrated with porting plan9 software to WindowsXP. To paraphrase, the writer describes XP as "just Windows 95 but with Cutler's greasy fingerprints all over it...".
tbf the reason why WinNT was so good compared to Win9x was because of Cutler's obsession with destroying Unix at all costs. I mean, WinNT didn't destroy Unix, but it's basically why it's not a joke in the server ecosystem anymore.
Let's check the facts using Wikipedia:<p>"Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp."<p>"[Dennis Ritchie] graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics."<p>I think that an operating system where you can't rename or delete a file that is open by some process is idiotic beyond words, even without MS-DOS drive letter names thrown in.<p>To work around the problem by providing a function to schedule a file rename at the next reboot is ironically cynical: you expect the system to crash often enough that this is viable.
Linked article on Cairo: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=48&DisplayTab=Article" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.window...</a><p>The link gives HTTP 302, but doesn't load from the new location I guess?
I wonder what his thoughts are about his operating systems in comparison to the popularity of Unix-like operating systems today. Could we ever expect to see a VMS-like OS on Raspberry Pi?