Why wasn't Windows built on top of Unix? | One Dev Question with Larry Osterman

A new video from Larry Osterman, Principal Software Design Engineer:

[esra_erimez]

Fun fact: Dave Cutler, the chief architect of Windows NT, had an immense dislike of Unix. "Unix is like Cutler's lifelong foe. It's like his Moriarty. He thinks Unix is a junk operating program designed by a committee of PhDs. There's never been one mind behind the whole thing, and it shows. So he's always been out to get Unix."

[adam]

I think we need a far bigger exploration of this topic. I get that Dave Cutler was brought in to lead the development of NT and that he hated Unix. The story essentially ends right there I guess, but the criticisms of Unix' security model and scalability I find pretty odd. Unix (and now Linux) has been the foundation of some of the most scalable systems on the planet for decades. And the security model may be simple but it's also pretty robust, especially in comparison to the complexity and Swiss cheese that is Windows.

[astridlindholm]

The failiure of XENIX is pretty much the cause here.
XENIX was Microsoft's UNIX, however, at that time UNIX developers bought licenses from bell labs to develop it, however, as XENIX was finishing its development time, Bell Labs announced that they would enter the unix market themselves, Microsoft thought they couldnt compete, and XENIX development was yanked, and microsoft moved their full focus to DOS and later to the NT kernel

[blendingsentinel]

Says that UNIX was Limited and didn't have total access control (NOT)
Windows: *Does the same*
Can't help but think that are just coping over the fact that they couldn't build a proper UNIX of their own.

[telesniper]

0:26 Ok, so stop right there. Yes up until that time all the microcomputers with few exceptions lacked memory management/protection. That's pretty much the foundational feature of Unix and is the basis for it's multitasking, user management, concurrency and so on. You don't have that, you don't have Unix. So in 1989, 386s had JUST come down to where they were reasonably affordable for most people and 486s had just come out. 286 and 8086 didn't have MMUs. This is the main reason why we didn't see something like the Linux project earlier than we did. Linus started it for his 386 as the target architecture. Now you did have stuff targeted to minis, but that's completely different. Zilog z8000 Unix port for example. Those still aren't what you'd consider a "personal computer" or microcomputer though.

[disband_thebbc]

It was because at the time a Unix license was $160, 000 per CPU, and they'd already gone to all the effort of ripping off Gary Kildare's CP-M. 🤣

[ecblanco]

Makes sense, the proper question would be "why Windows 11* wasn't built on top of unix or linux?"

[skreutzer]

With some respect to Larry Osterman for the work on the CLR and COM things (which are actually nice designs), this must either be an April fool's joke (but was not uploaded April 1st?) or is an attempt of fake news corporate history rewriting/retelling. You don't get to choose to "your" Windows being NT. The real question should be, why was Windows built on top of (and retained and later emulated/emulates) MS-DOS (former IBM-/PC-DOS, former "Q&D" 86-DOS, a poor clone of CP/M; also none of these in the abandoned OS/2), instead of a proper development from scratch? So with actual history, you get: Windows not having any noteworthy security at all while UNIX had some for quite some time. One main reason that UNIX wasn't a viable option is probably neither Bill Gates nor IBM would have gotten a cheap UNIX license from AT&T, and IBM wanted to get into the microcomputer market quickly and on the cheap. That's why Windows later didn't have some Unix to use as a base.

NT, being late, probably took some inspirations, especially on security (vs. Windows previously not having much) from Unix, like, that it might be a good idea to support multiuser, maybe not log in as Administrator/root, maybe protect system files. Took Windows forever to adopt that, from the other more advanced operating systems, like Unix-likes. And all this despite with Windows, it's usually just one user sitting in front of their single computer anyway, not doing any multiuser/timesharing stuff in terms of multiple users using the same machine at the same time, and accounts and things are offloaded into Active Directory anyway, so is a question if that's even a real feature on the operating system level, or just an integration with network services. "Enterprise", bwahaha!

[xsillycarnifex]

Enterprise scalable operating system? I really hope you are joking.

[unplayr]

Seems difficult to explain, moreover in a short video

[robertmacias]

Windows was built on DOS, an IBM mainframe OS. UNIX OS was a competitor. NT was tied closely to IBM's multi user platforms, because the code base was similar. In fact, little known secret; comdex 94 windows 🪟 4/NT failed to boot so they ran it on a WARP OS invisible to the crowd

[brandonandrews]

This doesn't answer the question at all. Modern Linux and other UNIX-like OS's obviously have ACL's and run on virtually all of the world's supercomputers, not to mention 90% of web servers and a majority of servers running on Microsoft Azure. I think a more honest answer is that Dave Cutler was simply more familiar with VMS and chose to build on his experience with that OS.

[SpecialAgentOso]

If they knew the truth about the Alto incident.. regardless, UNIX is an eventuality. Everything produced by Linux community automatically gets soaked up by UNIX, namely FreeBSD. Whatever is created for all the Linux distros, FreeBSD absorbs it, becoming almighty and all powerful.

[jesseandino]

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994, John Wiley & Sons Inc)

[thejpkotor]

Lol, security in Windows… 🤣 almost fell off my chair

[hawk]

Let's not do forward slashes let's do the

[CMG]

When Microsoft says UNIXs security model had issues Ads someone who worked as a PC tech in the early 2000's I have to laugh At the mess that was XP's complete and utter lack of security.

[Engr.Faisal]

The answer is: "We knew we needed for the marketplace". They needed it to make money which was not possible for them from Unix the way they needed.

[beer_goggler]

This is nonsense. Windows was originally built on DOS. There was no security model. NT was built by Cutler who came from DEC VMS so he built it from what he knew. MS could have gone down the Unix route with NT but they chose not to probably for commercial reasons. Hence the situation now where Linux is superior even if Windows has pointless eye candy.

[zenmaster]

windows hyperscale cloud operating system? is he joking?