NT influenced by Unix

For several years now I've been looking for something Bill Gates said. Unfortunately I had misremembered the actual words, and every time I found someone who thought they remembered it, they had the wrong words too and I'd come up dry yet again. Finally this week someone in a newsgroup pointed me to this:

(from Bill's speech at Unix Expo October 9th 1996)

Well, Microsoft stepped back and looked at that situation and said that the best thing for us might be to start from scratch: build a new system, focus on having a lot of the great things about Unix, a lot of the great things about Windows, and also being a file-sharing server that would have the same kind of performance that, up until that point, had been unique to Novell's Netware.

And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And that's no accident. I mean, we knew that Unix operability would be very important and we knew that the largest body of programmers that we'd want to draw on in building Windows NT applications would certainly come from the Unix base.

I mention this for several reasons. One is to add yet another data point to the web referencing Bill Gates and Unix. As I said, I had misremembered: I thought he had said something like like "Windows NT is effectively Unix" and I've heard other people insist it was more like "Windows NT is a better UNIX than UNIX". Of course it's still possible that he did say those other things also - but I'm happy enough with this quote for now.

In light of the recent saber rattling about Linux and patents, the "There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment" sentence is particularly interesting if these patent threats include things that are prior Unix art. "In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix" is also telling. I said before that I don't think that's the case; I think the patent stuff is talking about things like Samba and Mono, but even there the "influenced by that environment" could be important in the court of public opinion if not in actual law.

In any case, these sentences do remind us of the time when Microsoft at least had grudging respect for Unix.

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4 comments

Sat Dec 9 16:45:23 2006: 2706   BigDumbDInosaur


In any case, these sentences do remind us of the time when Microsoft at least had grudging respect for Unix.

They also continue to remind us that Gates is, parodon the expression, a bullshitter par execellence.



Sat Dec 9 19:00:04 2006: 2707   anonymous


The development team for NT were hired from DEC so they all came with backgrounds in VMS.

NT has a POSIX subsystem. You can add a Microsoft product called Services for Unix (SFU) which is now a free download. SFU was discontinued after version 3.5 but if you use Windows Server 2003 or Vista a lot of the functionality and other Unix stuff is included in the base product.







Sat Dec 9 19:44:20 2006: 2708   TonyLawrence


See (link) and you freely download it from (link)



Sun Dec 10 08:40:29 2006: 2709   drag


I beleive that a great deal of Microsoft's SFU is actually based on OpenBSD. Which is natural considuring OBSD's smaller, heavily audited code base.

Also don't forget that the first operating system ever sold by Microsoft was a Unix operating system as well as the fact that Unix was the sole development platform that Microsoft used up until 'Windows for workgroups' came along with Win 3.1, and probably was the main one until a while after that.

If your interested in the low level designs in the windows kernel this guy has probably a decent interview. It's a 5 part series on channel9, which is Microsoft 'geek' astroturf website.
(link)

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