Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook
45 points
3 days ago
| 5 comments
| computernewb.com
| HN
jdboyd
3 days ago
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For those unclear on what the large pile of .doc and .pdf files are, it appears to be some revision of the design documents for "NT OS/2", which then turned into just NT. This appears to be the Smithsonian description of their physical copy: https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-windows-nt-os2-design-wo...
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markus_zhang
2 hours ago
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Yeah I think this is the original design doc for NT.
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phendrenad2
7 minutes ago
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[delayed]
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cpeterso
1 hour ago
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> The first release of NT is planned as a workstation product that will provide a strong competitor to UN*X based workstations.

UN*X spelling for trademark reasons or a joke that UNIX is verboten at Microsoft?

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fredoralive
1 hour ago
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IIRC Microsoft's internal email still ran on Xenix at the time (until Exchange betas got good enough for internal use c. 1995?), so perhaps more trademarks than some sort of absolute hatred of Unix. Also note that one of the two APIs that NT OS/2 was initially going to support was POSIX, albeit perhaps more because the US government wanted that than a true love of UNIX. Although the design rationale document (ntdesrtl) does lament that existing POSIX test suites tend to also test "...UNIX folklore that happens to be permissible under an interpretation of the POSIX spec".
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AshamedCaptain
1 hour ago
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It is a generic way to refer to unix and unix-like systems. It is still in use today, e.g. to indicate Linux as part of the set. For this document most likely it refers to Xenix (MS's unix).
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cmiles74
1 hour ago
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I think trademark, I remember Bill Gates referring to Windows NT as "a better UNIX than UNIX".
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p_ing
33 minutes ago
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markus_zhang
3 days ago
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I think this is the only place that hosts a (hopefully) full electronic copy of the book.
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themafia
1 hour ago
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So.. you had _all_ this.. and for some reason just didn't want turn it into a useful set of "man" pages in your OS?

If they had their eye on the actual ball they wouldn't need to write Halloween memos and rant about developers on stage.

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p_ing
34 minutes ago
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Microsoft's eye wasn't on open sourcing their OS and describing the deep internals. They still don't want you to develop against the NT API, even though developers certainly do (and Microsoft makes compatibility shims for applications which do, when required).
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fredoralive
1 hour ago
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This mostly describes stuff to do with the [Windows] NT [OS][/2] (delete as appropriate) kernel layer, which normal mere mortals aren't supposed to interact with. You're supposed to use stuff like the Win32 KERNEL32.DLL not the more direct DLL, NTDLL.DLL (a DLL). Of course, true hackers scorn such abstractions.
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