Jim Allchin Quotes

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels

Android's user-space is so different from stock Linux, you can easily say that Android is not in any way a Linux system, except for the kernel.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

The interesting thing about Android's design is how little we modified the kernel.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

I'm a Windows guy. I have been for many, many years. I play games, and it's where games run, baby.

We've had a relationship with Microsoft for a while. It's bigger than just Xbox - we use Azure for some of our cloud stuff. PC Windows is a very big platform for us as well.