I think he's laughing because, despite a few superficial Unix-like elements, NT is about the least Unix-like operating system there is. It's sort of the anti-Unix!
I think the most you could say is that NT is more Unix-like than Win9x is. And definitely a lot more Unix-like than Win3.1.
A very nice, if overly bureaucratic, operating system developed by Digital Equipment and currently being slowly phased out by Compaq.
It runs like you wouldn't believe on the Alpha platform. *sigh*
For NT, MS hired away one of DEC's senior engineers and wrote a VMS-compatible kernel, but that doesn't seem to have bought them much in practice. VMS is blazingly fast, comes with very powerful administrative tools and some very nice low-level APIs, and never crashes, even when it's under incredibly heavy loads. (The Alpha my employer runs has come down 3 times in 5 years, and every time it was because we took it down - twice for moves, once to adjust the hardware page size(!)). NT, well... in our experience it's a lot more sluggish and less trustworthy.
Don't start me on the NT kernel. I'm going through upgrade hell right now. We'll be rebuilding my once sweet machine in the next week, hoping that will do something. Oh, and of course our crack IT team has been basically making shots in the dark, "will this work?" No.
I'll say this of NT, the NT system at my lab NEVER crashes.
The only problem we ever had with it was when the CD-ROM drive got dorked out--and NT forced you to keep a CD in the drive to be able to do anything. But the drive etched a circle into any CD you put in it! Tech support came out and replaced the CDROM drive and the mobo, and since then NT has performed flawlessly, without a single crash, for about 2 years.
use a micron pc at work with NT and it works very nice...very stable and seems to do what i want....always wondered why M$ didn't work on NT as it's main platform....if windows worked as well as NT i might have been tempted to switch from apple...luckily i am the only one at work with NT, so i often see how bad M$ is as the other computers in my office are crap....g
If you dive into the Windows's command-line ftp app, you'll find a string like:
[quote]Copyright (c) 1986 The Regents of the University of California<hr></blockquote>
Various components that MS ships with Windows have pulled BSD code.
But Windows NT is really its own OS...The people who designed Windows NT are the same people who designed VMS, but the similarities between the two OSes are trivial...
<strong>if windows worked as well as NT i might have been tempted to switch from apple...luckily i am the only one at work with NT, so i often see how bad M$ is as the other computers in my office are crap....g</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, all of Microsoft's products are based on Windows NT now. Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the upcoming Windows.NET are basically NT 5.0, NT 6.0, and NT 7.0. Windows 2000 is still referred to in some documentation as Windows NT 5.0.
From a user perspective, NT is much better than Windows 95/98/ME. But IMHO, as a server or development platform, NT still pretty much sucks.
BTW, does anyone have details about Microsoft's next operating system after Windows.NET? I read a rumour that their next OS will be UNIX based. It certainly believable. I mean, it would not be the first time Microsoft copied Apple.
BTW, does anyone have details about Microsoft's next operating system after Windows.NET? I read a rumour that their next OS will be UNIX based. It certainly believable. I mean, it would not be the first time Microsoft copied Apple.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I heard Bill Gates doesn't care for Unix. Maybe just because MS can't claim to have invented it, but strategically I don't think that would be a very good move for them.
[quote]Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the upcoming Windows.NET are basically NT 5.0, NT 6.0, and NT 7.0<hr></blockquote>
NT5 was a very substantial upgrade from NT4 -- some estimates pegged it at 50+% new code on an OS that had ~30 Million lines of code. XP (NT 5.1) has some fairly large differences, but nowhere near enough to be called NT6.
Comments
Kerberos, TCP/IP, and so on.
NT has roots in Unix, OS/2, MacOS, and many other operating systems. You can find UNIXy stuff in there, but it is not UNIX.
Sorry... can't resist... baaah hahahahaaa! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
I think the most you could say is that NT is more Unix-like than Win9x is. And definitely a lot more Unix-like than Win3.1.
<strong>VMS?</strong><hr></blockquote>
A very nice, if overly bureaucratic, operating system developed by Digital Equipment and currently being slowly phased out by Compaq.
It runs like you wouldn't believe on the Alpha platform. *sigh*
For NT, MS hired away one of DEC's senior engineers and wrote a VMS-compatible kernel, but that doesn't seem to have bought them much in practice. VMS is blazingly fast, comes with very powerful administrative tools and some very nice low-level APIs, and never crashes, even when it's under incredibly heavy loads. (The Alpha my employer runs has come down 3 times in 5 years, and every time it was because we took it down - twice for moves, once to adjust the hardware page size(!)). NT, well... in our experience it's a lot more sluggish and less trustworthy.
The only problem we ever had with it was when the CD-ROM drive got dorked out--and NT forced you to keep a CD in the drive to be able to do anything. But the drive etched a circle into any CD you put in it! Tech support came out and replaced the CDROM drive and the mobo, and since then NT has performed flawlessly, without a single crash, for about 2 years.
BTW, the computer is a Dell.
[quote]Copyright (c) 1986 The Regents of the University of California<hr></blockquote>
Various components that MS ships with Windows have pulled BSD code.
But Windows NT is really its own OS...The people who designed Windows NT are the same people who designed VMS, but the similarities between the two OSes are trivial...
<strong>if windows worked as well as NT i might have been tempted to switch from apple...luckily i am the only one at work with NT, so i often see how bad M$ is as the other computers in my office are crap....g</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, all of Microsoft's products are based on Windows NT now. Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the upcoming Windows.NET are basically NT 5.0, NT 6.0, and NT 7.0. Windows 2000 is still referred to in some documentation as Windows NT 5.0.
From a user perspective, NT is much better than Windows 95/98/ME. But IMHO, as a server or development platform, NT still pretty much sucks.
BTW, does anyone have details about Microsoft's next operating system after Windows.NET? I read a rumour that their next OS will be UNIX based. It certainly believable. I mean, it would not be the first time Microsoft copied Apple.
[ 02-07-2002: Message edited by: Brian J. ]</p>
<strong>
BTW, does anyone have details about Microsoft's next operating system after Windows.NET? I read a rumour that their next OS will be UNIX based. It certainly believable. I mean, it would not be the first time Microsoft copied Apple.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I heard Bill Gates doesn't care for Unix. Maybe just because MS can't claim to have invented it, but strategically I don't think that would be a very good move for them.
Quite a bit of the code in NT4 was re-written for NT5/Win2k...
Yes, the guy that designed VMS, David Cutler, now works at Microsoft and he was one of the chief architects of Windows NT 3.51...
NT does include a POSIX compatibility layer that allows some Unix apps to be more easily ported over (command line apps).
NT is certainly not Unix at heart though.
NT5 was a very substantial upgrade from NT4 -- some estimates pegged it at 50+% new code on an OS that had ~30 Million lines of code. XP (NT 5.1) has some fairly large differences, but nowhere near enough to be called NT6.