Inside The Development of Windows NT

mrpuffypants writes "Winsupersite has a 3 part series this month about the history and development of Windows NT all the way up through Windows Server 2003. The author goes fairly in-depth describing how Windows is developed, managed, and how all 50 million+ lines are compiled daily. Part One covers the history of NT from its early days at Microsoft and Part Two discusses how the deployment of the forthcoming server version of Windows is coordinated daily." *shiver*

hmmm...

[garcia]

The stuffed mascot [winsupersite.com] in the background looks an awful lot like someone else we know ;)

NT compile script

[Limburgher]

First line:

#!/bin/bash

WinNT development cycle.

[grub]

0) CVS checkout the latest net stuff from freebsd.org
1) Look at code and scratch head until "A-ha!"; enlightenment.
2) Merge code into Windows source
3) go to 0

There we have it

[Anonymous Coward]

We thought, 'How hard could it be to build an OS?' and scheduled 18 months to build NT. But we had forgotten about some of the important stuff--user mode, networking, and so on."

Either this means that the NT team were actually fairly clueless...or incredibly cocky. Either way, that seems like a pretty stupid thing to say.

NT development

[wiggys]

I always thought they hired a million monkeys, a million typewriters, a plentiful supply of bananas and left them to it...

Favorite Line

[apeleg]

"We thought, 'How hard could it be to build an OS?' and scheduled 18 months to build NT. But we had forgotten about some of the important stuff--user mode, networking, and so on."

Oh yeah ...

I can see the round table discussion now. . .

[bplipschitz]

"You compile it today."

"No way--*you* compile it!"

"No way! Hey--let's get Mikey, he'll compile *anything*!"

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't you find it sad that you know that?

Plus, I think it was pointed out b/c it was the "war-room" and there was a penguin in it.

Security?

[elliotj]

"By late 1989, the NT group began growing. They added a formal networking team and expanded the security team beyond a single individual who, incidentally, had also been previously burdened by file system and localization development."

You mean they've got more than one guy working on security for Windows? Oh come on, who's gonna believe that?

No...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

No... you're thinking of Linux.

Compiled?

[patvan]

I thought it was forged deep within Mt. Doom...

History of Windows

[Toasty16]

Bill Gates: "We need an OS that doesn't suck."

Engineers: "No problem, we'll release betas every year and you can sell them to the public for the price of a finished product."

Bill Gates: "Good idea. What do you think Steve?"

Steve Ballmer: "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...*wheeze* *hack* *cough*...."

Bill Gates: "It's ideas like those that will make you CEO in 10 years."

Re:NT development

[Dr.Enormous]

Of course not. That's not how corporations work. They hired a million monkeys, bought a million typewriters, and then hired five million more monkeys to intimidate the first million and eat all the bananas.

Re:No...

[wiggys]

Except with Linux they weren't hired, and the bananas weren't free as in beer, but only free as in speech.

Punted to longhorn

[dracken]

"On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."

Did one feature group have its *feature* postponed to longhorn or the *bug-fixes* postponed to longhorn ? hmmmmmm interesting.

best quote from the article

[babycakes]

"For Windows Server 2003, the War Room is run by Todd Wanke, who we eventually found to be an amazingly likeable guy. However, in the hour-long War Room sessions, Wanke rules with an iron fist" :)

Incremental build?

[BenjyD]

"...compiling and linking it into the executable and other components that make up a Windows CD is a 12 to 13 hour process that is done every day of the week

So they rebuild Windows from scratch every day? Somebody send them a copy of make, please.

Did someone say cocky?

[Anonymous Coward]

...the War Room is run by Todd Wanke...

Oh dear. Poor Todd.

Re:NT development

[fredrikj]

Nope, couldn't be, it would have taken billions of years for those monkeys to produce a system like NT. Sure, it's easy to achieve partial obfuscation through pure stupidity, but for complete, systematic retardation, you need hard working great thinkers that put their best effort into it.

Microsoft's original mission statement, perhaps?

[inertia187]

"We thought, 'How hard could it be to build an OS?' and scheduled 18 months to build NT. But we had forgotten about some of the important stuff--user mode, networking, and so on."

I think that sums-up Microsoft perfectly.

argument clinic

[Mr_Silver]

If there are one or more bugs in IIS, for example, a representative of the IIS team needs to be present to not only explain the merits of the bug, but whether customers are affected, how the fix might affect other parts of the system, and how soon it will be fixed.

To be honest, I don't see why they just don't hold these bug fixing meetings around the IIS guys desk :o)

Interesting...

[tshak]

There are 5000 developers on the Windows team generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003.

I think it's safe to say that they're most defniitely _NOT_ using VSS!

Re:WinNT development cycle.

[ImpTech]

> 3) go to 0

Dijkstra is rolling over in his grave...

Quality is Unrewarding

[Waffle Iron]

"NT 3.51 was a very unrewarding release," Thompson said, contrasting it with Daytona. "After Daytona was completed, we basically sat around for 9 months fixing bugs while we waited for IBM to finish the Power PC hardware. But because of this, NT 3.51 was a solid release, and our customers loved it." NT 3.51 eventually shipped in May 1995.

I guess this statement neatly sums up the attitude behind much of their corporate culture.

No monkey ...

[burgburgburg]

could write code that poorly. Leave the simians alone.

Re:Finally...

[StressedEd]

Off topic but....

Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish.

Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.

My favorite...

Build a man a fire and he will be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Re:WinNT development cycle.

[jeriqo]

> 0) CVS checkout the latest net stuff from freebsd.org
> 1) Look at code and scratch head until "A-ha!"; enlightenment.
> 2) Merge code into Windows source
> 3) go to 0

Damn! They use gotos in the development of windows?!
I know understand why it keeps crashing..

Inside the Development of Windows NT?

[labratuk]

"My god, it's full of crap!"

NT source

[ptaff]

Oh, so now we learn that NT is not from "New Technology".

So in a couple of years we'll learn that:

• ME: Miserable Everytime
• CE: Cramped Environment
• XP: Xor Performance
• Office: Other File Formats Imply Collaboration: Encrypt!

War Room

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

"Okay, Next bug: Clicking 'cancel' button at login circumvents the authentication process. Security team! what is this?!?"

"Uhhh Security Team isn't here today."

"Yeah?!? Punt that bug to longhorn!"

"Umm may-be we can give them ano-"

"F*$# Them! Punt to longhorn, Next!"

Re:NT source

[Anonymous Coward]

and BSD: Big, Slow, DEAD

Thank that fscking IIS guy...

[siskbc]

...for not showing up to the goddamned meetings with his bugfixes.

Damn lightweights

[YAN3D]

There are 5000 developers on the Windows team generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003.

50,000,000 lines of code / 5,000 developers= 10,000 lines of code for each developer/

Spread that over a 3 year development cycle. Thats only 9.13242 lines of code a day per developer! How much are they getting paid? Sign me up!

Tux, undercover...

[Capt_Troy]

Looks like one of our guys is on the inside. Caught him on film. He's infiltrated the war team. Check him out, in the background by the TV...

See it here [winsupersite.com]

Re:No...

[oconnorcjo]

No... you're thinking of Linux.

Wrong! Linux uses penguins!

Secret .NET language leaked

[jsse]

When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."

C#, J#, S#....now we have F#....shall we pronounce it "Fuck Sharp"?

Re:NT compile script

[pyrros]

Nah, my money is on:

@echo off

Re:No...

[t0ny]

see? linux is the second coming of Christ.

Worship the OS!

Re:Developer Count.

[delus10n0]

[chanting] Developers, developers, developers, developers!

Re:best quote from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Wanke rules with an iron fist

That's gotta hurt...

Where's the profit?

[YetAnotherName]

That "goto" in line 3 prevents lines 4 and 5 from working:
4) ???
5) Profit!

(Not that Micro$oft needs anymore of that.)

don't be happy

[newsdee]

That mascot is probably reserved for voodoo rituals :-) Geek or not, it's still MS... :-)

Bug fixing is "unrewarding"

[jetmarc]

> "NT 3.51 was a very unrewarding release," Thompson said, contrasting it with
> Daytona. "After Daytona was completed, we basically sat around for 9 months
> fixing bugs while we waited for IBM to finish the Power PC hardware. But
> because of this, NT 3.51 was a solid release, and our customers loved it."

I wonder why I think so bad about Microsoft products?!

Re:it's tux, troll.

[frenetic3]

Waddle does not have a red eye. [iluvcollectibles.com] At least not on the TY site and he was discontinued in 98. You must have been paid to make that silly remark, that or very stupid.

Where is my "+1, Huge Nerd" mod option when I need it... :P

-fren

Re:NT compile script

[csguy314]

First line:

#!/bin/bash

Line two:
#By compiling this program you agree to the following terms:

Re:There we have it

[Guppy06]

It could mean that NT was the first time they ever wrote their own OS...

Re:NT source

[DeadBugs]

And of course when you combine their server (NT) with the Desktop (ME) and portable OS (CE) you get predictable results

CE-ME-NT --- Cement.

Still and always.

[Richard Steiner]

You've been living in a cave, perhaps? ;-)

7000 "bug fixes" for one developer

[gosand]

The speed at which the team was able to fix all of the branding graphics, text, and registry entries in the system is a testament to the company's dynamic process for fixing bugs, Wanke said. The problem was that several thousand changes needed to be made, and that would normally require several thousand new entries in the product's bug tracking system. "I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, 'just go and fix it.' One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows] .NET Server. Let's just say that there are people I trust, and people I don't trust. I told these guys, 'don't tell me what you're doing. Just do it.'"

Ahh, good ol' sed. I wonder if he used the Windows version, or if he booted up the Linux box? :-)

This just goes to show that even the biggest software developers have to deal with "simple" requests like name changes that are very inefficient uses of engineers time. I want to know what super-duper advanced bug system they use.

Sounds like typical Micro-FUD to me, bud

[ausoleil]

Microsoft's record of "innovation" has sunk to a new low -- now it looks like they are going to embrace-extend-exterminate Tux. These bozos can't even invent their own mascot...but then again, a furry, squishy bug (the animal most reminiscent of Windows, IMHO) isn't the most inspiring marketing tool.

Bet they claim they had a penguin for a mascot all along and it was those hippies, foreigners and un-American freaks that stole their idea and made Tux the mascot for that mean ole' Linux.

How typical.

wow...

[SirHalcyon]

"We should be able to reproduce that [build] three years in the future, using the various tools, compilers, and scripts we used at that time."

amazing... they figured out CVS, aren't they special.

50+ million lines of code!

[vena]

all brought down routinely by 5 line scripts :(

Re:The NT Kernel Is Good

[Billly Gates]

"The NT kernel was good. Then Microsoft moved the GUI into the kernel",

Boy, its a good thing that no frame buffers are in the Linux kernel.

That's a PUFFIN [was Re:hmmm...]

[beerman2k]

What are you people blind?? That is not a penguin--it's a puffin.

Re:Incremental build?

[sharkey]

So they rebuild Windows from scratch every day?

That explains why MS tech support thinks simply reinstalling Windows every day isn't a big problem.

Re:Compiled?

[moosesocks]

From a rec.humor.funny posting (slightly edited) by dated 19 March 1996.

What you did not know about Windows NT

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit.

As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows NT on my PC. I told him how happy I was with this operating system, and showed him the Windows NT CD. To my surprise he threw it into my microwave oven and turned the oven on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw a inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE 10 E510CC98D444AA08E1324

'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said.

'No, but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'

One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...

Re:sick company

[Richy_T]

It's compiled on some M$ encumbered x86 every night from scratch

And when finally that CPU had come to the end of its working life and was finally retired, it's package was broken open and was found to be filled with some kind of organic matter. DNA analysis found its origins were from three men; Judas, Brutus, and Cassius

Rich

12 hours to compile?

[lilbudda]

I guess it's true: What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away...