On 27 January 2016 at 18:38, j...@cimmeri.com <j...@cimmeri.com> wrote: > Correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly (probably am), but wasn't NT a > descendent of DEC VMS?
Oversimplifying freely: DEC OS team lead Dave Cutler wanted to take VAX/VMS multi-platform. DEC rejected this. So he allowed himself and his core team leads to be headhunted by Microsoft. Microsoft had recently fallen out with IBM over OS/2. OS/2 1.x was a joint MS/IBM development. IBM kept the 80386 version, OS/2 2.x. MS got the portable, CPU-independent version, OS/2 3.x, which was barely more than a skeleton draft at that point. MS hired Cutler and gave him the OS/2 3 project. Cutler & his team retained some of it, but redid a lot, reusing ideas, concepts and even filenames from VMS -- but no code, obviously. The result was named "Windows NT". Entertainingly, WNT is what you get if you shift the letters of 'VMS" 1 position forward in the alphabet. Actually, though, it was developed on multiple CPU platforms, and one was an in-house board design based around Intel's RISC chip, the i860 -- codenamed the N10. NT allegedly stood for "N Ten" before MS marketing retconned it to "New Technology". -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
