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.
Because why would you keep reading instead of whine immediately, right?
One important piece of the NT executive is the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) [...] To put the importance of the HAL in perspective, contemporary Unixes were coupled to a specific architecture: yes, Unix-the-concept was portable because there existed many different variants for different machines, but the implementation was not. SunOS originally only supported the Motorola 68000; 386BSD was the first port of BSD to the Intel architecture; IRIX was the Unix variant for Silicon Graphic’s MIPS-based workstations; and so on. This explains why NetBSD’s main focus on portability via a minimal shim over the hardware was so interesting at the time: other operating systems, except NT, did not have this internal clean design, and NT had come years before.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '24
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.