14 ms·
Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
- eej71 8y agoInteresting that this story rises to the top. Curious what draws people to it?
- megaman22 8y agoAppears to be submitted after this comment in the z/OS thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652444
- chaotic_clanger 8y agoi must say i find it very interesting and maybe a bit ironic that nt is built on pirated sources (and architecture)
- caspper69 8y agoNowhere in that (poorly written) article did it say that anything was pirated.
- atombender 8y agoIt wasn't. NT was built from scratch.
- swagtricker 8y agoWritten from scratch? Maybe. But they sure as hell didn't get it done without stealing some key "recipe ideas" from VMS.
- icedchai 8y agoIt was the same architect and some of the same team. Those ideas came from those people originally. Of course there will be similarities!
- vxNsr 8y agoThat's a little disingenuous. The "recipe ideas" were from the same minds that came up with them originally. This comes down to who really owns an idea, the entity that paid for it or the mind that thought it.
- rodgerd 8y agoSo once you've worked on a problem once, your brain belongs to that employer forever?
- swagtricker 8y agoThey didn't copy directly, they just re-implemented from memory. I worked for Digital right out of college at the "DEC West" site off 520. A number of my co-workers REALLY hated Microsoft. Swore up & down they had colleges who had seen NT source code when they started working together with Microsoft on "Wolfpack" server clustering that they were using the exact same terms & constants (e.g. structs for system values were identical). Dave Cutler & his crowd were not popular. That $60M - $100M was payoff money to avoid a very public & very nasty copyright suit. And back then, $60M - $100M was considered real money.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoReminder that MS paid off Wang for the stolen OLE technology and that they stole from Stac / Stacker Technology also. They are better behaved now...
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agothey stole from Stac / Stacker Technology Did they really? I thought MS just implemented their own version of the tech and was accused of violating patents. Did they actually steal IP? Reading the Wikipedia article, it's not really clear what happened. Looks like MS review Stac code during licensing talks, but there's no mention of accusations of code theft. Then there's discussion of patent violation lawsuits and payoffs going both directions.
- zokier 8y agoIf NT was "pirated", then Torvalds must have been Blackbeard himself pirating UNIX
- brudgers 8y agoNovelty perhaps? A quick and dirty Algolia search suggests this story is the most popular one ever with "VMS" in the title. On the personal side, Dad wrote VMS scripts for work.
- EamonnMR 8y agoFor a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I recommend it.
- atombender 8y agoSeconding this recommendation. It's well written and covers a very interesting period of Microsoft's history that many people don't know about.
- enitihas 8y agoShowstoppers is a really good book, not just about NT and it's history, but in my experience it gives a good overview of how such a large scale project looks from the point of view of everyone involved, including the CEO and people working on some specific modules.
- kerng 8y agoI remember reading it about 10 years ago and found it quite fascinating. It goes into a level of personal detail on people involved, not solely technical but also tells what happened on a personal and emotion level. Pretty insightful in understanding how NT was built.
- teh_klev 8y agoBoth those books are excellent. I first read Soul of a New Machine back in the 80's when I was a spotty young apprentice Data General engineer learning how to repair Nova's and Eclipse S-series machines.
- cpeterso 8y agoIf you're interested in the design and implemention of the NT kernel, check out David Solomon's Inside Windows NT. The book's technical level is roughly at that of an undergraduate class on operating systems, going a little deeper than this article.
- dblohm7 8y ago
- zargon 8y agoMy high school had a VAX in the '90s that served a whole lab of terminals and was available over dial-up. A lot of my early programming was on that machine. Later I bought a VAX off ebay, joined DEC's VMS hobbyist program and provided free accounts to people at HobbesNet (https://web.archive.org/web/20050125003015/http://hobbesnet.org:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050125003015/http://hobbesnet....). I kinda regret getting rid of those machines now. It looks like the Deathrow cluster is gone now too (https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html).
- dboreham 8y agoI bought a couple of VAXStations on eBay in 2004 with the idea to preserve the "VMS experience". I got one of them up and running with the then current VMS version, and connected to the Internet. They're still sitting in my office, not powered on in 14 years.
- michrassena 8y agoI have two VS 3100s that I keep intending to install VMS on. I used VMS in my first year of college, and there's been nothing quite like the versioning file system to come along since.
- michrassena 8y agoJust a note for those unfamiliar with this hardware, the VaxStation 3100 38 (the model I own) was produced in 1989. My configuration has 24MB of memory (Max was 32MB). The 32-bit CISC processor runs at 16Mhz. I don't know how it compares to contemporary workstations, like those from Sun or SGI, but compared to PCs at the time it was much more powerful. These workstations must have cost tens of thousands when new. I bought mine for $10 each at least 15 years ago, sans hard drive.
- julian55 8y agoMy first job was working on RSX11M (predecessor to VMS) on a PDP-11. One thing that I remember is that the virtual address space of a process was 64K (i.e. 16 bit address) but the machine had 256K of RAM. I never used VMS as by that time I'd moved from minicomputers to microprocessors.
- vt240 8y agoI'm still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t
- wazoox 8y agoMaybe give freeVMS a try :) It's an old (crazy) friend of mine who did it...
- vt240 8y agoI remember messing around with that ages ago. I wonder if any of the contributors ended up working with VMS Software on the port. It looks, from their site, like they are getting close.
- beefhash 8y ago> It looks, from their site, like they are getting close. Does it? It looks to me that the last commit was almost five years ago[1]. [1] http://www.freevms.net/gitweb/?p=FreeVMS.git;a=summary http://www.freevms.net/gitweb/?p=FreeVMS.git;a=summary
- nickpsecurity 8y ago"trn" on Lobste.rs has been posting the company's slide decks about their progress. A recent one, "Proof Points to x86 Boot," shows they're getting close: http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html See "History of the Port" in bottom right for older posts. You might want to do it bottom-up going from oldest to newest. Also, a few things trn posted indicated they were doing non-x86 work like Alpha releases, too. Example below: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/07/prweb14487932.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/07/prweb14487932.htm So, it looks like they've been modernizing all three platforms instead of just porting to x86.
- GeekyBear 8y agoOne of the things that makes this article interesting is the fact that it was written by the current CTO of Microsoft Azure. He wrote extensively about Windows NT back in the day.
- polpo 8y agoAlso interesting is that Dave Cutler, architect of NT and VMS, was the first lead on Azure.
- teh_klev 8y agoAlso Mark Russinovich was the author of many life saving SysInternals tools and utilities[0]. He was also the author of the original Windows Internals books. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/
- Analemma_ 8y agoA persistent rumor is that Microsoft bought Winternals partly because Russinovich knew the guts of Windows better than a lot of their own engineers did.
- squarefoot 8y agoAccording to the Wikipedia article, it looks like more of an embrace and extinguish move, at least regarding the utilities sources and Linux development. "However, since the Microsoft acquisition, none of the utilities currently available are accompanied by source code, and the Linux versions are no longer maintained or available. Some of the coding tricks used were based on the Windows Native API (NTAPI), which was (and still is) mostly undocumented by Microsoft. Using these coding examples - with source - would enable developers to create extraordinary programs that performed operations that would otherwise have been impossible using a standard API. Examples include hiding Registry information, intercepting or hooking APIs to monitor file operations by the OS, as well as Registry operations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals
- jacksmith21006 8y agoMy all time favorite OS is VMS. Spent 100s of hours on VMS internals. But now many years later have to admit VMS was just a lot more complicated than what was needed.
- classichasclass 8y agoI remember the jokes about AXP being "Almost eXactly Prism" even though this was a rather unfair oversimplification.
- EdSharkey 8y agoI wonder how relevant the NT kernel is nowadays. My impression is the kernel as a foundation is that it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the windows structures atop it are eternally collapsing and rotted in parts. With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete. It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition has been reduced to "'Doing Linux' better than linux". Which is to say, "We surrender! There is no plan. Start migrating away from our legacy tech; here is a path." What's the point in continuing development on and for Windows if it no longer offers (and demands) technological distinctiveness? There is no point.
- bcoates 8y agoAt the API and system service levels the reason for all that goofy cruft is that businesses still use it, a lot, and are willing to pay fairly big bucks if and only if they get to keep it. Adding Linux features is just more cruft added to the kludge. Sells more units, particularly in Azure, not particularly part of some sort of strategic direction then, say, the Distributed Transaction Coordinator. The UI and OS-level shovelware stuff on the other hand is a nightmare that might kill the not-quite-golden-anymore goose.
- pjmlp 8y agoStill, it is more organized as desktop stack than any UNIX based alternative, with exception of macOS, which doesn't care much about their UNIX underpinnings, even during NeXT days.
- WorldMaker 8y agoIt seems just the opposite to me. The Windows Subsystem for Linux seems a testament to the NT Kernel and its deliberate approach from nearly three decades ago. Designed originally to support Win32, POSIX, and OS/2 frontends, for a long time it only ever really needed to exercise one of those things. Now it has the best POSIX layer it has ever had, focusing on byte-for-byte compatibility with binaries targeting the Linux kernel. That's incredible power, and the idea that the NT Kernel is doing it almost like running any other application is fascinating. If the NT Kernel is "Doing Linux better than Linux", that's a fascinating statement, because the NT Kernel is also running Win32, UWP, and all of its own chores at the same time. What's the Linux kernel doing? ;P Sure, Win32 is a beast now past retirement, and Microsoft has been trying to help that retirement happen sooner rather than later with UWP, but again, that seems a testament to the underlying NT kernel, because the NT kernel doesn't care, it's still chugging along doing its thing and doing it well. It's also running on more hardware combinations and more processor architectures than most other kernels could dream of touching.
- saul_goodman 8y ago"Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2 API as its primary interface." Right... There's another reason why it was originally called OS/2 NT: IBM had hired Microsoft to co-develop OS/2 with them before Windows NT development had begun (as early as 1985). The reason for a resemblence to OS/2 with the name and API compatibility would seem to be so that Microsoft could develop the NT product as "OS/2" which could be charged back to IBM. So, effectively, IBM was unknowingly paying for a chunk of NT development. By the time IBM realized they were getting worked over it was too late, they had already been taken for a ride by Microsoft. They lost in two ways: they lost the the desktop market to Windows which shipped pre-installed on nearly all consumer PC's, and paying for dev work on OS/2 1.3 which really was going into NT product). So IBM took OS/2 development back in-house in 1990 and licked their wounds, but it was too late by then. Except for the embedded market, OS/2 had lost.
- yuhong 8y agoThe OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of my favorite topics, BTW.
- pjmlp 8y agoWell, it helped that a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2. It has been several years, but I think the story is described here "Unauthorized Windows 95", I no longer have the book. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows-95/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows...
- rpiguy 8y agoWhat I find interesting is that PC-DOS (MS-DOS) was also a mostly clean room copy of CP/M. The guy who wrote it before Microsoft acquired it literally went through a CP/M programming manual and recreated the system calls for x86, changing a name here or there. Neat parallel to how NT doesn't copy any VMS code, but still essentially copies VMS in several aspects.
- bonzini 8y agoAnd the new MS-DOS 2.0 APIs were based on Unix, sometimes down to the name (for example INT 21h/AH=42h is named LSEEK, and the value you put in AL matches exactly the "whence" argument of the Unix syscall lseek)
- nineteen999 8y agoThere was a nice analysis of this done by Bob Zeidman where he compared the released CP/M 2.0 and DOS 2.0 source code. His basic conclusion was that source and basic commands were not copied, but that a large number of the system calls were copied. https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=71259 https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...
- JetSpiegel 8y agoDramatized in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire. That show is a mishmash of all lore from that era.
- Royal 8y agoNT doesn't have a hovercraft full of eels though.
- AceJohnny2 8y agoOfftopic, the print version of the page is so much more readable: https://www.itprotoday.com/print/24541 https://www.itprotoday.com/print/24541 It'll automatically bring up the print dialog, though, which you'll have to dismiss.
- RachelF 8y agoOdd fact: VMS is to WNT as HAL is to IBM.
- ch_123 8y agoAs the article points out, when Cutler et al. started at Microsoft, the project was already called NT OS/2. The WNT name came much later.
- bediger4000 8y agoAround 1996/97 I heard two very similar rumors, from two people who did not know each other. Both rumors had it that the NT source at that time was at least in some part the source of "Micah", the OS that Dave Cutler and crew had been working on for the Prism architecture. The NT source still had DEC copyrights and mentions of Micah in it. That's why DEC had such a weird deal with Microsoft, and why there was an Alpha AXP port of NT long after all other architectures went by the wayside. As far as credibility of this rumor, if you have a copy of "Inside the Windows NT file system" (https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-NT-File-System/dp/155615660X https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-NT-File-System/dp/1556...) by Helen Custer, you'll see a more than passing resemblance of NTFS to ODS-2, the on-disk layout of VMS filesystem. G. Pascal Zachary has a big chapter on the development of NTFS, if I recall "Showstopper!" correctly, but he doesn't mention this... coincidence at all, giving full credit for NTFS to a couple of guys on the NT team.
- dtmmax33 8y ago"VMS included a utility called BACKUP long before Microsoft developed NT's backup utility." Did Microsoft ever create a backup utility? I can't remember who did the NT 3.51, but 4.0 used Seagate Software for the backup app.
- JdeBP 8y agoYes. MS/PC-DOS version 2 came with BACKUP and RESTORE commands, for starters.