To be fair, I think that was the entire challenge in the first place: the contemporary microcomputers were relatively limited on what they could do, so you coul

To be fair, I think that was the entire challenge in the first place: the contemporary microcomputers were relatively limited on what they could do, so you couldn't necessarily afford to just do everything mainframes were doing. More importantly, it's not clear you would've wanted to. Having the taste and good sense to know what to "steal" and how to "steal" it was already hard enough work. A lot of good ideas took a while to come over, but a lot of probably bad ideas also never did. It's an evergreen interesting fact that Dave Cutler took perhaps a bit too much inspiration from prior VMS work to NT, but I also think there's no need to put an asterisk on it anymore than there is UNIX or anything else; it does ultimately stand on its own. Like great artists, great software architects steal.