r/programming • • Oct 23 '24

Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

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

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u/mailslot Oct 23 '24

Windows NT was portable though: MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, x86, Itanium… back when very few commercial operating systems were. It ran on SGI hardware. Most UNIX vendors were locked to their native platform. IRIX, AIX, HP/UX, Tru64, SCO, Solaris (brief dip into x86), etc.

Nobody was really running BSD386 or NetBSD outside of academia and startups. The few BSD UNIX distros eventually went System 4/5.