In your message regarding Re: Palm OS Development is a mess dated Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:20:04 -0500, Doug Gordon said that ...
> > 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. Used mainly with the R5 register, for handling arguments I believe, but that takes me back over 25 yrs. Ack I'm old and off topic. But, one of the greatest things you could do, and a huge security bug, was open a hard disk as a non-file structured device and read and write the bits, including the privilege bits in the directory structure... So, perhaps the security bugs we see today really do come from that less-than-secure OS (though I loved it!). /js > > Doug Gordon > > > > -- > For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/ > > > -- -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
