Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, have surprisingly never met before. That all changed at a recent dinner hosted by Sysinternals creator Mark Russinovich.
The worlds of Linux and Windows finally came together in real life, and Dave Cutler, Microsoft technical fellow and Windows NT lead developer, was also there to witness the moment and meet Torvalds for the first time. “No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.
[Image: Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/1750435121315.jpg?quality=90&strip=all]
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.
When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid “wrong” actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don’t even think about it. Just get used that you don’t move the cursor after clicking there, you don’t click here again after a first double click, and other such.
While things like editing config files were … more normal for the average person even, you’d have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn’t expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.
Windows won because most people didn’t know of anything else.
And it is still true today. Windows has the lion share of the market because we were raised with Windows and the vast majority of people don’t want to learn a new OS.
Luckily they learned from it and redesigned the kernel from scratch – hold on, my producer’s telling me that no, it’s still the NT kernel under there. Outstanding.
Maybe true today, but less true in earlier times (90s and early 2000s) when Microsoft was really gaining dominance.
I don’t think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.
When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid “wrong” actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don’t even think about it. Just get used that you don’t move the cursor after clicking there, you don’t click here again after a first double click, and other such.
While things like editing config files were … more normal for the average person even, you’d have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn’t expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.
Windows won because most people didn’t know of anything else.
And it is still true today. Windows has the lion share of the market because we were raised with Windows and the vast majority of people don’t want to learn a new OS.
I’m not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.
Yeah, probably not. But the idea that Windows won because of how great it was just doesn’t hold up
Luckily they learned from it and redesigned the kernel from scratch – hold on, my producer’s telling me that no, it’s still the NT kernel under there. Outstanding.
Most users neither know nor care what that is.
good talk
They might care when their os showing the same problems it did 30 years ago