BOOKS : ShowStopper!
This is an old book (94) about the creation fo the first version of Windows NT.
Wow. The guy isnt' a very good writer, killing the flow by introducing another character along with their page length bio, and he has a number of analogies for the computer illiterate that are plain wrong.
It does still manage to give you an idea of how badly put together the whole thing was, even though it was being produced by fantastically capable people who were working insane hours. It's just amazing to think how shit the process ended up and, goodness, what the product was like (they did get it right with Windows 2000 - 6 years after the fact?)
There are also some nice references to 'Cairo', a project that STILL hasn't made it into the OS (just been cut from the next release _again_).
For me I have to wonder what was happening. While not really comparable to an open source model, I do wonder what makes it different. There was an excellent example of a few (more than one) guys who were working on the new NTFS file system for the hard disk. Now they did have to maintain the existing implementations (OS/2 and DOS), but they almost didn't get it written in the 2 or so years they had. Now there is a linux file system called 'reiser' that is more advanced than NTFS and was originally written by one guy (Hans Reiser), part time, over the course of 2 years (from what I can tell. Looking more closely it seems that this is wrong, but I can't actually find any concrete information)
Ah well, all software sux is the moral of the story.
Wow. The guy isnt' a very good writer, killing the flow by introducing another character along with their page length bio, and he has a number of analogies for the computer illiterate that are plain wrong.
It does still manage to give you an idea of how badly put together the whole thing was, even though it was being produced by fantastically capable people who were working insane hours. It's just amazing to think how shit the process ended up and, goodness, what the product was like (they did get it right with Windows 2000 - 6 years after the fact?)
There are also some nice references to 'Cairo', a project that STILL hasn't made it into the OS (just been cut from the next release _again_).
For me I have to wonder what was happening. While not really comparable to an open source model, I do wonder what makes it different. There was an excellent example of a few (more than one) guys who were working on the new NTFS file system for the hard disk. Now they did have to maintain the existing implementations (OS/2 and DOS), but they almost didn't get it written in the 2 or so years they had. Now there is a linux file system called 'reiser' that is more advanced than NTFS and was originally written by one guy (Hans Reiser), part time, over the course of 2 years (from what I can tell. Looking more closely it seems that this is wrong, but I can't actually find any concrete information)
Ah well, all software sux is the moral of the story.
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