Dave Cutler is no ordinary engineer. This unknown legend of operating system development started his career in the 70s with projects such as RSX-11 and VMS. Signed for Microsoft in the late 80s Leading the development of Windows NT, Arguably the most important operating system in Redmond history.

It didn’t end there, and Cutler later went on to co-create Azure and the birth of Microsoft’s cloud age, but all these successes were interspersed with the occasional disaster.

And the biggest one yet was Windows Longhorn.

In a nine-minute excerpt from an interview with Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, Cutler explained how this happened. Windows Longhorn had “the worst code I’ve ever seen”.

In October 2003, Microsoft announced Windows Longhorn, an ambitious project aimed at improving the security of operating systems and incorporating new features such as WinFS, a promising file system, or Avalon, a new graphics subsystem.

This project started to go wrong very quickly. In 2004 there were worrying signs that development was in chaos. Microsoft restarted the project to base it on code from Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 rather than Windows XP, and the result of this effort was a criticized Windows Vista.

Cutler explained in the interview that although the launch of XP was “largely successful” it was “uneven” and the most serious problems were in security. And using this foundation turned out to be quite challenging. Cutler, with help from AMD, tried to persuade Microsoft to switch to 64-bit development for the server and then the desktop, and that’s when They encountered so many problems that they had to stop the project.

Windows XP security had gone from bad to terrible, and Cutler explained, “XP security got so bad that we actually had to stop development.” [de Longhorn] and fix errors. “My group fixed about 5,000 of them, and we went through everything and came up with the code as if we were working with a shovel.”

That’s when he saw “the worst code I’ve ever seen, IME (Input Method Editors) code made in Japan.” It was so bad, mistakes were ignoredSome were so big that even his team couldn’t fix them, and we just “lightened them up as much as we could.”

Image | Dave’s Garage

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