Inside Windows 2000

part 1

A talk from Dave Probert on the design of the NTOS kernel. Shame Microsoft didn’t put this anywhere people could have found this 20+ years ago, just as a shame they never opened up NTOS like they did that even tepid Windows Research Kernel. It goes without saying this is the ‘Linux is a cancer’ generation, with the crazed idea that looking at Linux would contaminate Windows.

PART 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrohgqgzhgM

PART 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUK_OfEMQos

PART 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqnvmedwkYc

Too little, too late I guess. It would have been an interesting foundation a long time ago.

And of course the ongoing work behind the scenes making Windows fully 64bit compatible on the Alpha at the time.

7 thoughts on “Inside Windows 2000

  1. Great videos and some interesting bits from behind the curtain, thanks for sharing! The Linux comments were kind of funny from today’s perspective, as well as the comment about being able to finally rip out OS/2 support (before quickly commending IBM on its work).

    Windows 2000 was such a big leap from NT4, both in the it’s support for “modern” feature (APM/APIC, PNP, DirectX, USB, PC-cards, WDM) but also cementing Novell’s demise with Active Directory. I can’t think of a Windows release other than 3.x that had as big of an impact on the industry as 2000 did. Even XP, which finally killed 9x was more evolutionary than revolutionary.

    • While 4.0 got people over the ‘its scary’ as a server, 2000 took so much of the old OS/2 compatible networking into the new TCP/IP modern age. AD was a lot more involved to setup than a simple domain, but wow was it just so much better.

      There is that interview with Dave Culter being tickled out at the moment but his comments on XP were really scathing how they forked an old 2003 dev branch, and made things so much more worse. NT always was a unified product, but doing the split for XP always caused more problems. At least the 64bit stuff re-unified it. And it explains why Server 2003 was so much better than XP.

  2. I have to wonder if there is going to be extensive cuts. The fallout between Cutler & Letwin was pretty bad from what I understand that they had some meeting about the whole situation, but Cutler had dismissed the old teams. And I’d heard the OS/2 stuff being something that was sent out to Israel so they didn’t have to deal with it at all.

    • The whole thing got uploaded, and yeah I didn’t notice anything controversial, or even a mention of Letwin that I recall.

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