[geeks] Carly Fiorina to enter politics? This nation is doomed...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 @ 20:07 -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> >>>As originally detailed, NT should have been OK.
> >>
> >>Hell, 3.x was wonderful.  Everything went to hell in 4.0.
> >
> >3.x still had graphics integrated, which is where I think it went to
> >hell.
> 
> No, they didn't.  

I think we have different definitions of "integrated".

I don't mean integrated into the kernel.  I mean the OS as a whole was
useless without the graphics subsystem.

You couldn't run NT headless in any consumer release, unless I missed
something big.  

I remember in one shop we had a few NT 3.51 servers, and we would very
much have liked to run them headless, and have all the software run on a
console or a glass tty.

> 3.x's video drivers still ran in a separate VM, and the GDI was inside
> the Win32 subsystem.  4.X brought video drivers into kernel space,
> and brought the GDI (along with most of the Win32 subsystem) into the
> kernel as well.

Yep, and what was funny is they said that it was the only way to make a
PC run graphics fast.  Funny because at the time several X servers were
able to outrun Windows graphics functions despite the overhead of the
kernel->user barrier and the heavy X protocol.

NT as an OS was dependent on its graphics subsystem, and that's the
thing that turned me off in the beginning.

Just look at the tools, nearly all Windows utilities, and just about
every server program written: they all require various parts of the
graphics subsystems.

On the other hand, I helped install and debug several headless OS/2
systems years ago.




-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than
the sage amongst his books For to you kingdoms and their armies are mighty
and enduring,  but to him they are but toys of the moment to be overturned
by the flicking of a finger." - anonymous     ]