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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> The NT network stack is cleanly layered, supported multiple adaptor types and protocols and clients all in one, and was so complicated that up to NT 4, when you finished making changes to the networking configuration and clicked "OK", a tiny embedded Prolog interpreter fired up and ran a single embedded Prolog program, the only one in all of the DOS, OS/2 and Windows codebase that I'm aware of -- possibly the only one in any commercial OS anywhere. This Prolog code parsed your desired config, worked out how to interconnect all the layers of the NT network stack, and wrote the configuration file(s) and registry settings in order to give you what you wanted.

Aargh. I don't think even the more advanced Linux distros have reached that level of complexity yet. Although I suppose Prolog is a natural solution for constraint solving .. why do you need a constraint solver anyway?

(Linked deep dive https://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsof... )

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Said prolog interpreter is also why Microsoft could easily boast that NT is much easier to configure networking on than UNIX systems of the day.

There was more prolog hidden underneath network operating systems than people think, too.

Well, they may have claimed that, but that wasn't really my experience at the time!

Probably depended heavily on what kind of options you needed.

WinNT network config covers a lot more than people are aware even if you keep just to TCP/IP - how many people are aware that all WinNT >=5.0 systems are OSFPv2 routers? There's also of course optional RIP listener, or the part where WinNT >=6.0 is IPv6-first.

When the claim was made, you could end up working with few major network protocol families, and while vendors failure was leading to ending GOSIP it was still unclear if TCP/IP would be winner (I think TUBA - aka IPv9 - was still in the running when the prolog part of network configuration was done), you had huge installed base of IPX/SPX (that didn't really go away till early 2000s), you had NetBEUI support for dealing with LanManager variants, there was Banyan VINES you might have to cooperate with (especially if you tried to sell to USMC, iirc), there was X.25, FrameRelay and other WAN specific protocols you might need to support, there was AppleTalk, there was ATM (not just IP over ATM), there was support for dealing with IBM Mainframe networks...

All of the above also had presence in the Unix market, and given 1993 release date, all of that was present in some ways - and Microsoft could capitalize on "we can easily support all of that".

Plus DECnet, XNS and the short lived OSI stack too.

Most unices of the time barely supported anything else other than tcp plus whatever vendor specific stack they might need.

OSI falls under GOSIP - which was government (or at least DoD?) mandated attempt at OSI stack. DECnet Phase V is also OSI based, but yes, DECnet Phase IV might have windows options, so could XNS. Windows could also easily adapt to new physical layers.

Windows networking stack was easily extensible, something that to this day Berkeley-derived ones have issues with (Sockets, being "temporary hack", lacked features to handle multi-stack well). A non-trivial reason I heard for popularity of Solaris in certain telcos was that it offered XTI interface, meaning much easier access to ISO/OSI related protocols present in many areas of telco gear.

ITYM OSPF?

... Indeed.

I even checked online to ensure I didn't typo-it, except I ended up (apparently) on page that had the typo...

> Aargh. I don't think even the more advanced Linux distros have reached that level of complexity yet.

No, but they do have parallel config utilities fighting each other in the case of Linux mint. Took me a few hours to figure out why I was unable to switch from a static IP to DHCP.

> No, but they do have parallel config utilities fighting each other in the case of Linux mint. Took me a few hours to figure out why I was unable to switch from a static IP to DHCP.

Windows 10 had this as as well: the new user friendly ui can show dhcp while the interface actually is statically assigned An ip address. Took me while. Seems they dropped not only any consistency but also the prolog part in the new ui.

Does that still exist? If that's so useful why remove it?

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