Windows Vista

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Bill Campbell wrote:

> David Korn, author of the Korn shell and uwin, an AT&T project to provide
> Unix services on Windows, made a presentation to the Seattle Unix Group
> several years ago in which he talked about the development of uwin.  The
> thing that he said that astonished me was that they found the same system
> call's API could differ in parameters and returns, not only between
> different Windows families (win95, win95, NT), but within a family
> depending on build or patch level.

There may be some cases of that, but they are very rare. I work with code 
that runs in "user" space and calls hundreds of Windows calls. While there 
have been enhanced calls or more options added to existing calls, I can't 
think of a case where there was not foreward compatibility. My single code 
body runs on everything from Windows 95 to Vista. The version dependencies 
I have built in are there to take better advantage of new features in 
newer versions.

I will say that I get frustrated by increasing security restrictions, 
sometimes imposed in a ham-handed fashion.

> 
> >> Then again, having the video drivers in the kernel is simply asking for 
> >> trouble.
> >
> >I was not aware that they were in the kernel. Can you substantiate that?
> 
> I first learned of this about ten years ago working with engineers of the
> ``Nterprise'' Windows server system, a system that allowed one to run
> Windows applications on an NT server using standard X11 clients.  IMHO,
> this was a far superior solution to the similar Citrix program which didn't
> work with standard X11.  Unfortunately the company that did Nterprise had a
> source code licence from Microsoft for NT, but M$ wouldn't sell them a
> license for NT 4.x so they had to drop the product (it seems that Microsoft
> did a source license to Citrix -- and then M$ bought Citrix).

Let me get this straight - you're basing your comments on Windows NT 3.5?

It is true that back then drivers were written to run in "kernel space". 
That is not the same as being part of the kernel. YEARS ago, however, it 
became possible to write printer drivers, at least, in user space.

Microsoft's licensing decisions re. third party system developers are not 
relevant here.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

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