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by greenyoda 2623 days ago
The kernel is a pretty small part of the operating system. Development of Windows NT started in 1989[1], when RAM sizes of PCs were measured in MB, not GB, so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat. (NT 3.1 could run on a machine with 12 MB of RAM.[2]) Also, it wasn't the first kernel Cutler wrote. While Cutler is undoubtedly a brilliant programmer, I doubt he could keep the details of all the other parts of the system (graphics, etc.) in his head at once.

Other well known kernels were also written by very small teams. The first Unix kernel was written by two people and the first Linux kernel was written by one person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Development

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Hardware_requiremen...
1 comments
jdsully 2623 days ago
> so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat

That's not how NT was seen at the time. It was quite bloated relative to other PC OSs. Of course modern OS features required a bit more overhead than the crazy world of windows 3.0.

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greenyoda 2623 days ago
I guess I should have said "a lot of bloat by today's standards"...

My first experience with NT was NT 3.51 on a 32 MB machine. If I remember well, it didn't feel much slower than Windows 3.1. But finally having a PC operating system that didn't crash all the time really made development much more pleasant and productive.

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santoshalper 2623 days ago
32MB was a lot of memory back then. Typical machines at the time had 8. 16 was extravagant.
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temac 2623 days ago
A lot of affordable machines a few years old even had 4M. I remember my dad upgraded from 4 to 8 and from Win3.11 to Win95. The computer had maybe 1 or 2 years, hardly more. It was around 1500€ (well, it was 10000 FRF at the time) when bought, with a 14" screen.

32M was insane, probably out of reach of all but rich homes.

Only a few years later (1 or 2) a classmate told us he had a computer with 128M. That sounded so ridiculous that we thought he was a mythomaniac or something. Turns out his dad was able to get a powerful workstation from work, and the first time we visited him we saw that mythical beast, and our mind were blown.

And right now the private working set of my start menu process is 27M...

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