Re: To the OP: Wintroll FUD about alleged insecurity refuted (was: Re: Linux why?)

On Friday 08 December 2006 16:02, Tony Lawrence stood up and addressed the
masses in /comp.os.linux.misc/ as follows...:

Aragorn wrote:

Enter Windows NT. A microkernel which was largely stolen from VMS, onto
which a 32-bit Windows kernel was bolted. Security was also bolted on
via the NTFS filesystem and ACL's. But this security was *clearly* only
bolted on, because Windows could still be installed on a FAT32 partition,
which doesn't support ACL's.

I so wish I could find this, but I think it's been expunged from the
Net: at one time Bill Gates said something like "Windows NT is
effectively Unix" - he was referring to the Mach kernel parts of
course..

Actually, what he said was that "Windows NT is a better UNIX than UNIX". ;-)

But Windows NT isn't UNIX at all. In fact, all NT versions have a compound
kernel, comprising of the NT kernel itself and a Win32 kernel - now a Win64
kernel for /x86-64/ of course.

The NT kernel was written by Dave Cutler of DEC - Digital Equipment
Corporation, usually just referred to as "Digital", but not to be confused
with Digital Research, who developed CP/M and who have later on released
the successful DR DOS versions.

Cutler was also the guy who had written the VMS kernel for DEC, and when he
was caught red-handed while inserting literal DEC VMS kernel code into NT -
and this code was the property of DEC, of course - DEC threatened to sue
Microsoft for copyright infringement.

Microsoft knew it didn't stand a chance and so it "bribed" DEC by admitting
to releasing NT for the DEC Alpha processor.

But even next to VMS, NT doesn't compare. Because - as you say - they added
on a bunch of crap. And this crap was called Windows... ;-)

--
With kind regards,

*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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