Windows, Part I - Dave Probert

What Dave brings out in this piece reminds me of something that has sadly disappeared from modern computing by way of evolution. It’s that in those early days of the 70’s and 80’s you were more than likely to be an Electronics Engineer as opposed to a programmer. Chicken and egg, which came first the hardware or the software.
One can sense the potential of multi-core CPU’s but as Dave points out in many senses they have been around for some while at the machine level. The challenge for contemporary programmers is to exploit this new technology and its not going to be easy.
Dave has a lot more control at the Kernel level than say a C# programmer has with a real time thread. So do we end up with an NT5 style programmers kernel sat atop the machine Kernel simply to control such threads?
In my experience real time threads are of limited use outside of machine control and mechanical automation, e.g. CNC lathes. The OS systems that control these machines are very similar in philosophy to what is being done in NT5. The only real difference
is that real time means literally that. A tooltip must arrive at its destination at the right time or crunch.
I love this stuff!! I can't wait to hear more from Dave!
This type of low level stuff fascinates me. I guess that's why I'm going back to school for Computer Engineering.
Taskerr wrote:In my experience real time threads are of limited use outside of machine control and mechanical automation, e.g. CNC lathes.
Great video. This brings back memories of the days when I was poring over manuals and tinkering with different sector interleaving schemes on the Apple II. Same timing/latency issues back then: waiting for the information to pass under the read/write head.