open, close, dup, dup2, lseek, read, write, fileno, etc.

Don Clugston dac at nospam.com.au
Tue Feb 12 00:33:04 PST 2008


Jussi Jumppanen wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:
> 
>> According to Wikipedia, Windows NT was released in 1993, which 
>> is the first OS (I believe) that contained CreateFile, etc.  
>> Those functions were different from DOS which had no names 
>> for the functions, just interrupts (there was a DOS3Call in 
>> windows 3.x which wrapped the interrupt call).
> 
> I might be wrong, but I thought the Win16 API had an OpenFile 
> function which let you get away from having to use interrupts, 
> and it dates back to the days of Windows 3.0 maybe even earlier.

Early Windows versions had no documented file handling functions other than 
OpenFile.
There were undocumented function calls _lclose(), _lseek() etc which were not 
documented until Windows3.0, but were present in ancient versions of Windows.
In those early days, Microsoft recommended that you use the C library functions 
for file handling.

>> It would have been very easy for Microsoft to implement 
>> unix-like system calls in NT instead of what they have, 
> 
> Windows NT 3.0 at the API level is almost a straight copy 
> of OS/2, the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft of the 
> late 1980's.
> 
> So IBM is also very much to blame for the Windows we have 
> today ;)
> Jussi
> 



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