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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I thought the big reason for moving the GUI into the kernel was for performance rather than compatibility.

That was the official word from Microsoft at the time, but Mark Russinovich, who had Sysinternals.com at the time, benchmarked and said that pushing low-level graphics commands (draw line, fill, etc; stuff graphics cards do) across the kernel boundary wasn't a bottleneck. He was critical of those decisions. Microsoft eventually hired him to shut him up.

And because he was clearly a genius.

There's a story behind that buyout. Russinovich had a business called Winternals, and had written NTFSDOS [1], which allowed access to NT file systems under DOS.[2] Microsoft didn't like that, because it allowed booting from a floppy, bypassing NT's security restrictions, and resetting the administrator password, copying, or modifying files. (The concept that a computer could be secure when someone had enough physical access to boot a new OS seems silly now, but back then, the opposition was script kiddies, not intelligence agencies and organized crime.) So Microsoft bought Russinovich out. Wikipedia: "Winternals was acquired by Microsoft mid-2006. Microsoft has removed any traces of NTFSDOS..."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFSDOS [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000126093942/http://sysinterna...

> Microsoft didn't like that, because it allowed booting from a floppy, bypassing NT's security restrictions, and resetting the administrator password, copying, or modifying files.

This sounds nonsensical, like folk history. You can already create a boot disk to do this using all Microsoft tools: Assuming the volume is not BitLocker'd it's pretty simple to do all of this stuff with WinPE [1], including the version that shipped in 2006, or with a Windows setup DVD. Or you could simply move the drive to a machine where you are an admin.

I am pretty sure they bought winternals because they wanted to hire MarkRuss.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environ...

This was in the nineties, no PXE back then.

The winternals acquisition happened in 2006. And you don't need pxe for what I described either.

NTFSDOS was released in the late '90s, Microsoft acquihired Russinovich in 2006. That program wasn't any more of a factor than all the other wonderful utilities he'd developed over the years. In fact, if you're looking for something Russinovich was forced to retire right after acquisition, you really should mention NewSID.exe, which was really shut down hard while in ascendance (as virtualization became commonplace).

I think MS just wanted to hire one of the best Windows hackers of all time, and they pounced as soon as they got a window of opportunity for whatever reason. Everything else was a bonus.

Yes, Mark was running sysinternals for years before Microsoft hired him.

Great programs he produced though! Really really helpful. One of the first things I install on a new OS.

Great programs that are still available free from Microsoft ;-)

You could use the recovery console to gain access to an NTFS partition and I think it was a Windows 2003 disc on Windows XP wouldn't even ask you for the administration password. You couldn't access encrypted directories, but NTFS-DOS was hardly a threat. Most Linux Live CDs could at least read NTFS.

Don't forget about NTSwitch[1]. This little gem would switch Windows Server to Windows Workstation and vice versa.

[1] http://windowsitpro.com/systems-management/making-windows-cl...

>Microsoft eventually hired him to shut him up.

Well i don't buy that part. When I first came across sysmon/regmon/procmon, I found it to be an amazing piece of work. An extremely small free standalone program that gave you a realtime insight into the OS? Heck, if I kept a list of people to hire, he would definitely be on it!

That thing was even 1/10 of the "hello world" Go program I compiled!!!*

*(~100Kb vs 1Mb) I know Garbage Collection adds a lot to size but its still a fun comparison.

The large binary size of a Go program has nothing to do with "garbage collection". It's because the binaries are statically linked against the Go runtime. Try compiling a static C "hello world" program and it will be comparable in size to the Go binary.

I think the "hired him to shut him up" thing is a bit of a myth. From the horses mouth: http://youtu.be/o1DskPD-Ngc?t=2m21s .

Having said that, he was quite vocal at the time, and I personally think that he may have been a large part of the huge Vista -> Win7 improvements, although have no evidence to support this. The timing just seems about right.

> Microsoft eventually hired him to shut him up.

... and they tasked him with this obnoxious and highly dispensable cloud computing project. Anything just to keep Mark shut up, ANYTHING.

Mark Russinovich was hired by Microsoft for any number of reasons, not the least among them being the fact that he was easily one of the top Windows hackers out there. I can still remember marveling over the books he used to write about Windows internals - good stuff, and really made me aspire to become a better developer.

The funny thing is this claim reminds me of Skywing. Yes, I am talking PatchGuard.

in terms of GUI, performance is responsiveness...

and for a windows system, it needs to support a range of hardware configurations...Some could be really slow...

That is correct.

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