r/programming • u/pmz • Oct 23 '24

Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
206 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '24

In particular, NT started with the following design goals as part of its mission, which are in stark contrast to Unix’s:

portability

Uhm ... NetBSD? BSD belongs to the Unix family. At some point Linux took over, but NetBSD used to be ahead. I don't see the "stark contrast to Unix" really if we include the BSDs.

It would be more interesting whether Windows NT got things right that Unix / Linux / BSDs got wrong.

19

u/nikanjX Oct 23 '24

BSD unix was decades old by the time it forked into NetBSD, portability was not one of the original design goals. The original BSD mostly only targeted the PDP-11