[Technical] Notebooks for New Staff - DET needs to help

[Clark, Ian C]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au 
> [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Con Zymaris
> And as Dave Cutler (who also happened to be the designer of VMS at
> DEC) hated Unix about as much as he hated GUIs, he'd be 
> turning even further in his grave, if he in fact were dead ;-)

Yes, Con, to those hates, add bosses, colleagues, women, people who
write software they don't use themselves, academics ... to the likes add
racing cars and martial arts ... check out the vitriol:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000060.html  (I have the
original book - very entertaining!)


> Cutler's work on VMS and Windows NT [*] were Cutler's 
> attempts at reimplenting a Unix-like platform, without them 
> being Unix.

The maniac who pretty much wrote the kernel by himself is a Member of
the National Academy of Engineering and the holder of twenty patents,
having written not one, but several operating systems in his lifetime,
such as the much loved RSX and VAX operating systems for the PDP-11 and
VAX midrange computers. 

I think it's true to say that Frank Soltis' System38/AS400, Cutler's
RSX/VMS/NT and Thompson/Richie's UNIX were all written taking into
account the principles of 1960s academic OS design.

>  "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reimplement 
> it. Poorly."

Heh heh heh. I wouldn't write that in a uni essay. I can't think of
anyone educated in OS design and history who would say that.

If you want to properly understand and compare the systems you mention,
while avoiding the personal biases of the Slashdot.org set and the
commercial biases of Micro$oft, Apple, Sun, Novell, et al, a great
introductory text is Operating System Concepts (Silberschatz, Galvin and
Gagne), which is now up to its seventh edition, while Andrew Tanenbaum's
Modern Operating Systems (Linux actually began as a clone of Tanenbaum's
Minix) is still an entertaining classic.

At Micro$oft, Cutler has clashed frequently with the Unix gurus at the
company. Dr Jim Allchin is the actual head of the Windows Division. In
the 1980s he came to fame by writing the Banyan Vines Network Operating
System. He had adapted it from Xerox's original NOS just as Novell had
done with Netware, and then stuck it on System V Unix.

Cutler's mate from the VMS days, Mark Lucovsky (just poached by Google),
was a senior architect on Windows 2000 who had also designed Unix
kernels for mini-supercomputers.  

Micro$oft's head of research, Dr Rick Rashid, wrote the Mach microkernel
Apple OS X runs on.

In the past, there were also the guys who wrote Xenix (actually the
first OS Microsoft released), which was also the most important Unix on
the PC platform for almost a decade (the project lead was a guy named
Bob Greenberg who made his money, got bored, retired early, and went on
to design the Cabbage Patch dolls!).

> [*] you can right shift the characters from VMS -> WNT ;-)

It's funny, but an urban myth - if you believe that, you also believe in
the burglar/toothbrush and baby in the oven/turkey stories!

Cheers,
Clarky


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