
Unix’s Revenge - mbateman
http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/29/unixs-revenge/
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demallien
There is a huge assertion in there - that Windows isn't as adaptable to
multiple different environments. I know that empirically this looks to be the
case - we don't see the NT kernel running on gadgets - but is there actually
any true technical reason stopping this? By that, I mean is there any barrier
that a team of Microsoft engineers couldn't overcome in say a year?

It would be interesting to know what those limitations are if that is the case
- there would no doubt be lessons to learn for all of us.

~~~
gaius
You know, NT was developed on the i960, a RISC chip from Intel that is now
mainly found in printers, and once ran on AXP, PPC and MIPS in addition to
x86. There was even a SPARC version. The decision to target only x86, ia64 and
x64 now is purely a commercial one - people just didn't buy NT on anything
else. And ISVs weren't interested in cross-compiling their software.

I actually used NT on AXP in the mid-90s. Kick-ass platform for SQL Server.
But ultimately the momentum wasn't there.

~~~
demallien
Yes, but I believe those were all desktop systems or servers, weren't they? I
was thinking more about limitations that make it difficult to adapt in
resource constrained environments such as we find in today's smartphones. We
do see Windows used in places such as ATMs (I got a great photo of one
rebooting on me the other day, Windows icon and all!). But even Microsoft
don't seem to want to use it in their portable gadgets. I for one do not have
a good understanding of the issues that make this type of adaption difficult
on Windows, or even if it's not a technical question, but rather a political
one...

~~~
gaius
There is no _technical_ reason that you couldn't run NT on anything you could
run Unix on. It was architected from day 1 with a hardware abstraction layer
(HAL) specifically for that. In theory, port the HAL (assembly language) then
the rest is just a recompile. There's more to it than that (the SPARC version
suffered severe performance issues due to endianness) but that's the general
idea.

I expect Dave Cutler remembered that VMS (at the time) could only run on VAX,
the OS and CPU were developed in tandem and VMS relied on some features not
present on other CPUs (I don't recall exactly what offhand). It was a huge
engineering effort to get it onto Itanic.

~~~
iuyfgtrghjk
VMS also ran on Dec-Alpha.

The main problem was that a single Alpha could replace an awful lot of VAX HW
and so to claw the profit back, the license fees meant a VMS Alpha was about
3x the price of the same machine running NT.

We used to buy NT Alphas and install Linux - to compete with Sun Sparcs.

~~~
gaius
Yep, later on - AXP also developed by DEC with VMS in mind.

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jbarham
This entire article is ridiculous. Even if were true, it wouldn't be
interesting as very few smartphone users know what OS kernel their phones run,
and fewer still care.

And even as a developer you won't get very far trying to develop applications
for iOS, Android or RIM's QNX based devices using the original Unix API.

It would be much truer to say that the rise of smartphones represents the
"revenge" of ARM over Intel.

~~~
rsanders
You won't get very far developing GUI applications for modern Unixes using
_just_ the original Unix APIs, either. And most Windows programmers today
aren't using Win16 APIs. I think you're missing the point.

I've written a few iPhone apps. My background in Unix, and the Unix libraries
I've been able to use without modification, were both extremely helpful.

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gaius
_But Bill Gates, no doubt motivated by license fee considerations_

Well that's wrong for starters: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix>

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wazoox
the comments are interesting too.

