Fascinating (but long) interview

[The_Doc_Man]

For those of you who didn't know this, a principal architect of Windows NT was a gentleman named Dave Cutler. He recently gave a long interview to a YouTube content creator who posts under Dave's Garage.

There is a TON of history to be had. You can also search for Dave's Garage and Dave Cutler together and get several excerpt interviews.

Windows NT was the first "real" version of the Windows Operating System. Before that, but after Win 3.x, each version of Windows was all riding on DOS but that fact was hidden. It was POSSIBLE to get to the underlying DOS command prompt by shoving Windows out of the way. After WinNT, though, the command prompt became the layer and Windows became the real underlying O/S.

Dave Cutler is also the person that made Windows Paging Dynamics work so well. He had done it before with the Dynamic Memory Partitions of RSX-11M and the paging architecture of VMS. And he had a hand in some of the file security code, though I'm not sure how much in that case.

 

[Isaac]

I've heard so many people claiming to be the mind behind windows, but i suppose in all fairness there were a LOT of minds behind it. the video of the guy who wrote task manager is great too

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I've heard so many people claiming to be the mind behind windows, but i suppose in all fairness there were a LOT of minds behind it. the video of the guy who wrote task manager is great too

I know this for a fact from having read articles at the time in some trade journals while I was still with the U.S. Navy Reserve group. Dave Cutler was not the only person involved - not by a long shot. He was, however, a principal contributor to Windows NT, which was the first version of Windows to actually be the base operating system. Before that version, Windows was a layer on top of DOS. After that version, the DOS command prompt was a layer on top of Windows.