Byron -
In 1970's, Dennis Ritchie has already envisioned what a "real" OS should look like: multi-tasking, interrupt-driven preemptive kernel.
DEC designed RSX-11M in the early 70's - multi-tasking, interrupt-driven preemptive kernel - produced it in large volume. It was the workhorse of the revolution in minicomputers, and was stable and scalable when UNIX was an interesting university experiment. The author and lead architect on RSX-11M? Dave Cutler.
When UNIX was still locked into a few arcane university and scientific applications, DEC and Cutler took the next step - the 32 bit VMS / VAX development. Remember VMS? Cluster capable, big SMP capable, reliability which beat the mainframe operating systems hands-down? That was 10 years before any UNIX had similar capability.
And guess who the lead architect on NT has always been, since 1988 when MSFT hired him away from DEC? That same Dave Cutler who designed both of those multi-tasking, interrupt-driven preemptive kernel OS models. Why do you think that the guy who designed the systems which pretty much set the standards in the 70's and 80's would have suddenly forgotten everything he knew? Maybe you don't know much about NT internals or design direction.
Multitasking, Clustering is all so new to NT. I interviewed for a NT cluster job in DEC last year, so many concepts that were 70's 80's technology for UNIX are new to NT.
You must be on drugs. NT has been multitasking since the first prototype in 1989. DEC has more than 30% of the key patents on clustering, Tandem has almost all of the rest, and MSFT has licensed most of that. UNIX clusters are in the stone age compared to either Tandem or VAX clusters.
I assume you were interviewing with the DECWest DCNT cluster team - don't confuse a skunk works 10 man effort with the core engineering at either DEC (CPQ) or MSFT. You didn't talk with the real engineering teams, obviously.
I guess you missed Tandem's 16 node NT cluster demonstration in May of 1997 - 64 CPUs, 2 terrabytes of data, scaling better than 90% over the cluster.
Get your head out of the sand. UNIX missed the boat in 1990 when they failed to reach an industry consensus on standards.
|
