Re: Quality systems (Was: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died))

[Tom Welsh <news@tom-welsh.co.uk>]

In article <9fa75d42.0305160440.7846d18c@posting.google.com>, soft-eng
<softeng3456@netscape.net> writes
>
>Btw, the architect of Win-32 is the same individual
>who architected VAX-VMS.  (Bill Gates doesn't sit down
>and design Windows himself, he hires good people.)
>That might be one of the reasons why Win-32 has always
>been relatively stable, and with almost a decade of
>use behind it, has achieved very decent quality levels.

That turns out not to be the case.

1. Dave Cutler didn't architect VAX/VMS all by himself. He was a member
of a team, and not necessarily the dominant member (except perhaps in
terms of personality).

2. Cutler didn't design Win32 either. He joined Microsoft in 1988 to
write a new operating system, which turned out to be Windows NT.
Cutler's team wrote the operating system kernel and services. Win32 was
a load that NT had to carry, not a source of strength. 

3. According to G Pascal Zachary's book "Showstopper!", "...Cutler
didn't disguise his scorn for Microsoft and its products. He thought the
company's code was poorly written, and that DOS, its crown jewel, was a
'toy'".

Actually, it was the requirement to support the Windows graphics
subsystem that came closest to wrecking the whole NT project. Zachary
again: "Cutler saw the worst in graphics. 'He worried about that group
all the time,' an intimate said. 'He saw them as loose cannons'".

It is true that Cutler's work laid the foundation for a series of
"relatively stable" Microsoft operating systems. But there was (and
still is) a fundamental tension between the things that make VMS and
Windows NT stable, and the user interface glitz that have made Windows
the popular success it is.
-- 
Tom Welsh