John F. Sowa wrote:
> In response to legal requirements by various governments and the EU,
> Microsoft has released a massive dump of protocols, binary file
> formats, and other specifications ...
> That's the good news. The bad news is that people who have looked
> at this dump have summarized the results in one pithy observation:
>
> In order to understand any of it, you must understand *all* of it.
> ...
> What makes Apple's OS X more intelligible, efficient, and robust
> than Vista is the fundamental principle at the core of Unix from
> day 1: modularity. (01)
I think closer inspection would reveal multiple "evils" at work in the
Microsoft operating system software. (02)
(1) a general lack of design principles in MS Windows in the 1990-95
period. Bill Gates even said that he chose a team with a general lack
of systems engineering experience that might interfere with their
inventiveness. (03)
(2) a poor hardware base. The original Windows was built for a 1968
hardware architecture, as implemented in a 1974 design. The Windows
designers built a simulated silk purse on a sow's ear platform. (The
Apple guys had the benefit of a 1980 hardware architecture.) When Intel
finally built a 1980 hardware architecture in 1994, Windows 95 was
hacked to take advantage of it. (And a new operating system project --
Windows NT -- was created.) (04)
(3) upward compatibility requirements. Windows '95 thru Windows 2000
were upward compatible with earlier Windows, to allow all the products
that had worked around earlier Windows systems to continue functioning.
This meant that later versions, based on competent hardware and
managed by competent software engineers, had to be coded around original
bad designs, and around ugly designs that had been created by hardware
necessity. They were trying to build a straight house on a crooked
foundation. (05)
(4) all things to all men. The Windows target market was businesses,
control systems, gamers and hobbyists, and grandmothers. Windows XP was
an integration of the separately designed Windows NT multiprogramming
system (based on the design of VAX VMS and specifically written for the
Pentium), an upgraded Windows file system, a new graphics management
model, a new communications model, and a new security model, and of
course, a few upward compatibility features. Unfortunately, it also
became a patchwork, because too many new features were introduced at the
same time, and there were unanticipated interactions. (And it may have
been rushed to market; I don't know how much of a threat there was --
see (5).) (06)
(5) external pressure. Vista is a hack on Windows XP whose primary
objective was to lock down security before certain powerful
organizations declared Windows operating systems too dangerous for use
by their personnel and/or their contractors. And they had an
alternative in Linux. So, many vulnerable elements of the system were
simultaneously hacked and a few were re-engineered, with all kinds of
accidental interactions and ad hoc fixes. (07)
A similar history plagued the design of communications software in
Windows (half inside and half outside): weak hardware, upward
compatibility with OLE then COM then DCOM then ActiveX and finally .net.
Other MS products were perpetually inventing new COM/ActiveX features
to enable their own intercommunication designs. The problem was a
failure to design a single competent interprocess communication model
and enforce discipline on its in-house users. (But such a discipline
would have prevented them from modifying the system to allow them to
one-up competing applications, too.) (08)
So the current state of affairs is not really surprising. After the
original "design" by tinkerers, the only software engineers in that
whole sad history who had the luxury of producing a new modular design
were the Windows/NT folk. To some extent this is the price of success. (09)
IMO (my favorite soapbox), it is to a greater extent a direct
consequence of the adage attributed to H.L.Mencken:
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
As long as businesses worldwide are willing to pay good money for
unreliable equipment, there is no incentive to build quality. (010)
And OBTW, the saga of Windows is a nearly one-for-one repeat of the
sequence of mistakes IBM made in designing operating systems for the
360/370 series between 1964 and 1976. And the behavior of the business
community matched. George Santayana was right. (011)
-Ed (012)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (013)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (014)
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