Again, I agree. But don't compare Windows to the Linux kernel! They are
fundamentally different. Windows has been developed in such a way that
the
GUI cannot be separated from the rest of the system.
Actually it can. At my "regular" job, I deal with a system called "Windows
XP Embedded" that lets you tailor XP down to almost whatever size and
capability you want, including barely more than the kernel. You can boot it
off a flash card and run it on a diskless embedded processor. The original
Windows NT kernel was written by a guy that I knew from my previous life at
Digital Equipment Corporation, and who really knew what he was doing (a lot
of interesting similarities to realtime VAX/VMS, which he also wrote).
Unfortunately, the original vision for that O/S became greatly corrupted
when it became necessary to layer the graphics stuff on top of it, and the
kernel became buried so deep that it was almost forgotten. But it is
there -- somewhere. :-)
Also interesting is that that makes the Windows kernel a descendant of the
old RSX-11 operating system that ran on DEC PDP-11s, and that the original
Unix O/S and C language were also written on the PDP-11. In fact, the C
language construction "a = *px++" was invented to take advantage of a
specific addressing mode of that processor.
Doug Gordon
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