IT>On Tuesday, 22 December 1998,
IT>     FRANCOIS THUNUS wrote to IVAN TODOROSKI about ext2fs

 IT>>   HPFS is extremely robust, so this rarely happens, and when it does,

 IT>>   I wonder if EXT2FS and NTFS are this robust...

 FT> No idea about NTFS, but if I remember it well, m$ designed both
 FT> hpfs and ntfs, and ntfs hexadecimal code is the same as hpfs...

IT>  Well all I know is that it is designed by Gordon Letwin, but wasn't
IT>  aware that he worked for MS. If he did, than I must admit that HPFS is
IT>  probably THE BEST thing ever to come out of that place... or maybe
IT>  it's the ONLY good thing?

Really! Here is the HPFS related scoop on Gordon.

Gordon Letwin, considered by many to be a prima donna, is an old MS
employee that Gates grabbed from Heath in the early days. Gordon was at
least one of the first 20 employees of Microsoft. He appears in a 1978
picture of MS technical employees (11 total) when the company was still
in Albuquerque New Mexico, near MITS (Altair).  That was right before Bill
Gates used his inheritance to force the move home to Washington state and
end up with more stock than original equal partner Paul Allen.

Letwin was MS chief architect of OS/2, the author of the first book on
OS/2 (which I still have with forward by Gates) and supposedly laid out
the ground work for HPFS on a paper napkin.  He used to participate in the
advocacy newsgroups on usenet, until Microsoft rained him in during flame
wars.  Filthy rich from options but still says that he is a simple
programmer. ;-)

There are many that still believe that IBM's, never saw the light of day,
file system was better and that the first HPFS was rigged to do better on
the benchmarks, winning the team competition.  Gordon advocated HPFS as
the best file system there was until NTFS was created.  Following the
standard MS marketing book, HPFS suddenly became mediocre.  Still HPFS was
good enough and Gordon/Microsoft now hold a patent on HPFS.  At least they
do according to Doug Azzarito, the last IBM developer to do any major work
on HPFS.  Interesting that HPFS386 seems to disappear with the Aurora
server, if you don't have it from Warp 4 advanced server, you can't get
it.

--Lynn

 * SLMR 2.1a * Working with a WHILE...WEND mind in a DO...LOOP world

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