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Although the article mentions similarities between VMS and Windows NT, it downplays just how extensive a debt NT owed to VMS. Microsoft's Azure CTO wrote about
by GeekyBear 3y ago
Although the article mentions similarities between VMS and Windows NT, it downplays just how extensive a debt NT owed to VMS.
Microsoft's Azure CTO wrote about it back in the day:
>In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities.
Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms.
... "Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars.
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...
- sneed_chucker 3y agoYeah I mean the fact that David Cutler and ~20 other VMS engineers were poached directly from DEC to work on Windows NT basically says it all.
- sillywalk 3y agoI don't know if this is true, but Microsoft (or Cutler ) allegedly stole some of the MICA source code and used it in Windows NT. "According to inside sources, many portions of NT’s code and even the comments were identical to Mica. As a result, Digital sued Microsoft. Microsoft and Digital settled out of court and the result was the Digital/Microsoft Alliance. " [0][1] [0] https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt [1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...
- rbanffy 3y ago> the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32) One interesting design feature is that NT was designed to expose multiple APIs on top of its kernel services. POSIX was another available from the start, and OS/2, IIRC, was another. Win32 was to make it easier to port Windows software to NT and is more or less equivalent to Unix's libc as a layer on top of the OS. Also IIRC, the Windows limitation I always make fun of, that of deleting open files (which is a fairly common thing in Unix - opening a file in /tmp, deleting it while keeping the file descriptor for further operation), comes from Win32, not the NT kernel.