Goal Setting
First job was to establish high level goals.
- Portability – Ability to target more than one processor, avoid assembler, abstract away machine dependencies. We purposely started the i386 port very late in order to avoid falling into a typical, Microsoft, x86 centric design.
- Reliability – Nothing should be able to crash the OS. Anything that crashes the OS is a bug. Very radical thinking inside of Microsoft considering Win16 was cooperative multi-tasking in a single address space, and OS/2 had many similar attributes with respect to memory isolation
- Extensibility – Ability to extend the OS over time
- Compatibility – With DOS, OS/2, POSIX, or other popular runtimes. This is the foundation work that allowed us to invent windows two years into NT OS/2 development.
- Performance – All of the above are more important than raw speed!