this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Nice to see a pro NT article for a change but there are some details wrong
"It’s true that Unix has attempted to shoehorn other types of non-file objects into the file system"
'Everything is a file' was Unix's design principle from the very start. It wasn't shoehorned in. It is IMO superior to NT's object system in that everything is exposed to the user as the file system rather than hidden behind programming api's.
Agreed.
I skimmed through the article, and see no mention of ~~DEC Alpha~~ VMS, which is NT's predecessor, which is really disappointing. Great read though, very well done.
DOS and Win3.1 really have little to do with NT. A DEC Alpha team was laid off around 1990, MS hired them, and NT is the result. Mark Minasi (I think, may also have been his partner, who's name I can't remember) wrote an article about 1998 in Windows Magazine (NT Magazine?) about it, and broke down the components of both NT and Alpha to demonstrate the similarity.
I've been looking for the article for a couple years now.
Alpha was a processor. You’re thinking of VMS.
You're right. Thanks for the reminder. Memory ain't what it used to be.
Ah, the good old VMS. Did quite some coding on a VAX11/780. Very nice and round OS. NT was basically a VMS clone for Intel. Although I think there was an implementation for the Alpha, too.
I always thought it was that everything was a file but that everything could be interacted with as if it was a file.
I'm not a kernel dev, but I've read often enough that there are some places where "everything is a file" somewhat breaks down on Unix. (I think /proc and some /dev)
For an "absolutely everything is a file" system have a look at plan9, it was the intended successor to Unix, but then that got popular while plan9 stayed a research project.
I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.
It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.