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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?

This journey then continued in 2020 with me choosing to join Microsoft after a long stint at Google and me buying the Windows Internals 5th edition book in 2021 (which I never fully read due to its incredible detail and length). Support for Windows applications comes from the Win32 server, which is special because it’s the only one that’s directly visible by users: it controls console programs and DOS terminals, and it has certain privileges for performance reasons. And even if support for asynchronous I/O has existed in Unix systems for more than 20 years now, it’s still not widespread: few people know of these APIs, the vast majority of applications don’t use them, and their performance is poor.

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