I'm glad somebody pointed that out. It's infuriating listening to people who've only ever worked with Linux to a low level when they preach about how it is the most modern kernel bar none. The facts are really quite different. Dave Cutler, of Windows NT fame, is no slouch. He is every bit as good as Linus. Just without the petty attitude problems his far more popular rival exhibits.
Cutler is a f'n genius. He was 47 when Bill Gates called him up in the late 80s and poached him from DEC. He was one of the core architects of VMS and brought all his A-team with him to Microsoft. NT was engineered to be a high performance OS from day one, and it is evident throughout the architecture of the kernel and executive.
Linus was 22 and implemented enough system calls such that he could run bash, mocking a UNIX-like system, which, again, VMS ran rings around in the day.
Linux's success has absolutely nothing to do with technical superiority.
