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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

When I worked at Apple in the mid-90's (BS before Steve) they lost $1B while I was there. I left and moved away because I didn't want to be there when it was sold or went out of business. Exactly one year later Steve came back. Oh well. Being there at the time not one person would have ever thought Apple could be viable much less worth $1T.

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Somehow I found it funny that companies like Microsoft and Apple basically survived because someone brought a new OS from the outside.

In the case of Microsoft they directly acquired the original DOS and the designers of Windows NT - so they've perhaps done that twice?

I didnt know this about NT - Where did they come from?

Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but was waysided by management so he jumped ship, and built the design he wanted to build at DEC (but never got management buy-in for) at Microsoft. All outlined in the book Show Stopper! THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT

Also, if you took a peek at his wikipedia entry, the guy is behind almost every large MSFT OS related initiative in the last few decades: NT, Azure, XBox hypervisor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_to...

And if I remember correctly, NT's kernel was a microkernel. It seemed to be the best choice for the future, back then.

Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.

I wish people would stop saying its a hybrid because of the graphics being moved into the kernel...

That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty.

NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).

Show Stopper! is a great read. My copy is always lent around the office, especially to interns: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1416925.Show_Stopper_

You can read more about it in a story from 1998 that was posted here two days ago (probably part of the reason that so many ITT know the story ;))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652502

NT has a lot of VMS roots.

Probably a coincidence, but a lot of noticed that "WNT" is one letter on from "VMS".

Mind you, HAL is one letter behind IBM.

Coincidentally HAL is also Hardware Abstraction Layer, part of the WinNT kernel's architecture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction#Microso...

Some claim the HAL/IBM connection was intentional (though Stanley denies it).

Which one did Microsoft buy?

MS-DOS.

didn't actually buy it initially just licensed it. The underlying company tried to sell the license but Microsoft stopped it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the morale and employees opinions back then? Was there a prevalent theory about what's wrong and how to fix it?

Best thing the CTO did (Ellen Hancock) was to kill the Copland OS project, which then led to the ultimate decision to buy NeXT, which led to Steve coming back, which lead to $1T. Props to her for doing the right thing.

Back in '96 I was an assistant admin for a network of some 100 Macs in a biotech lab.

My supervisor was a die-hard Apple lover, had a Newton, and a fair bit of Apple stock. They could do no wrong in his eyes.

I was a Mac fan (had a Duo 280c, encouraged my folks to purchase 603 clones) but pessimistic about Jobs return. In my view at the time, he had done damage to Apple with the Mac intro and had failed w/ NeXT, even though I was huge fans of the hardware of each. I just didn't think he had the ability to scale a hardware company. I was hoping for BeOS to be the savior.

Nonetheless, it was exciting to see him return as the interim CEO. My supervisor bought a bunch more stock, think it was something like $7/share, and I gave him alot of grief for being foolish. I'm sure he's living in paradise right now, lol.

Press was brutal so it was pretty depressing, some people were still hopeful when Amelio came in, but after a month he vanished and we never heard much from him any more. They took away everything, plants, drinks, even the popcorn machine supplies to save money. Then we were building a new OS which everyone knew was a nightmare death march.

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