Inside Windows NT
Microsoft Windows NT is the foundation of the new 32-bit operating system designed to support the most powerful workstation and server systems. The initial developer support for Windows NT has been phenomenal--developers have demonstrated more than 50 Windows NT applications only months after receiving the pre-release version of the software. This authoritative text--by a member of the Windows NT development group--is a a richly detailed technical overview of the design goals and architecture of Windows NT.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
29mentions
21people
2010–2026years
38% recommend62% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?
If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).
The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]
Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.
You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].
A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].
Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30.
[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/
[2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked/videos
- Yeah this is definitely a hell of read which probably has more historical values than real ones. The book "Inside Windows NT" also gives a good overview about Windows NT 3.1. There is another one called "Understanding Windows NT File System" which talks about the fs I think.
The biggest problem is NT is not open-source, and while there are leaked copies posted online, there is no "official" build guide so people have to try their luck.
- Windows has extreme similarities with Unix, and if you would look at a really different OS like, for instance, IBM i, it becomes clear. The Windows-Unix affinity is so great that you even interact with devices through file handles by Read, Write, and IoCtl methods.
Check "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer, an official account. She explicitly credits the handles to Unix. That's not surprising - not only was Unix fresh on the minds of the NT developers, with quite a few of them having Unix backgrounds, but every conceptual ancestor of Windows NT was at least significantly influenced by Unix:
- VMS: The VAX/VMS team were in regular contact with Ken Thompson, and got the idea for channel IDs (= file descriptors) for representing open files and devices from him, as well as the idea of three standard channels which child processes inherit by default: input, output, error (the error one was at the time a very recent development, I think in Unix v6 or v7)
- MICA: Would have been a combined Unix and VMS compatible system.
- OS/2: FDs with read, write, ioctl again.
Even MS-DOS is already highly Unix-influenced: they brought in file descriptors in DOS 2.0 and even called the source files implementing the API "XENIX.ASM" and "XENIX2.ASM" (see the recent open source release.)
I have deliberately chosen to not make anything of the fact that Windows NT was intended to be POSIX compatible either (and even supports fork, which WASI mercifully doesn't) because my point is the fact that all modern general-purpose operating systems are at least very much inspired and deeply indebted to Unix. I would accept that OSes that are not general purpose may not be, and old operating systems made in siloed environments like IBM are fundamentally very different. IBM i is very different to Unix and that's clear in its native APIs even though
Cocoa and Android APIs don't look much like the basic Unix APIs, it's true, even if they are implemented in terms of them. WASI wants to define APIs at that lower level of abstraction. It's tackling the problem at a different level (the inter-process level) to what object capability _languages_ are tackling (the intra-process level).
- Windows Internals is the book you want.
Or Inside Windows NT, if you want "version 1" of the Internals series. Or read the Windows NT OS/2 Design Workbook - https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb....
Yes, Win32 is just one personality, but a required one. OpenNT, Interix, SFU, SUA will ride alongside Win32. And of course there was the official OS/2 personality.
- Inside Windows NT, the 1st edition, by Helen Custer, is one of my all-time favorite books! A forgotten gem. It's good to see it being praised.
- For a deep technical dive into the architecture of Windows NT 3.1, I highly recommend the book "Inside Windows NT", the very first edition, by Helen Custer. She had extensive access to the development team, including key architects, during development, and the book was published at the same time as Windows NT 3.1 was released, if I remember correctly.
One of the most enjoyable books of its kind I've ever read.
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