Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux quicker to support multithreading than Windows, largely because big megacorps needed that for their servers? "

Surely you jest. The other Unixes, including Microsoft Xenix, supported multithreading before either Windows NT or Linux even existed. Big megacorps in that era used Sun Microsystems ("The com in dotcom™") server and other proprietary Unix servers because both Windows NT and Linux on the x86 hardware of the time weren't considered good enough to handle megacorp server loads and that didn't change until around '00.

If you go strictly by release date, Linux 0.01 came out in '91 and Windows NT 3.1 came out in '93 so it's technically correct that Linux had multithreading first but neither Linux 0.95 (what would have been available in '93) nor NT 3.1 was exactly something anyone would consider using in production, let alone at a megacorp.



Linux didn't have real threads early on tho, didn't it? LinuxThreads were only introduced in 1996, and they were broken in many ways.


You're right. According to the old Linux Threads FAQ (https://web.fe.up.pt/~jmcruz/etc/threads/linuxthreads-faq2.h...), that seems to be about the right timeframe.

Oh well, shows what my memory's worth.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: