As many of you may be aware: Microsoft Windows NT, at a certain point in its development history, became available for deployment on workstations built around the Alpha processor that, at that time, was produced by Digital.
I remember seeing an article on one of those online computer-news sites that claimed that the porting of NT to the Alpha platform was one point in an out-of-court settlement between Microsoft and Digital, which had been suing Microsoft for patent or infringement.
The allegations in the lawsuit, the article said, held that the underlying architecture of NT had been stolen in large part from Digital’s VAX operating system. The GUI was grafted from Windows (at that time, Windows 3.x), and Microsoft APIs had been incorporated into it, but the core OS instructions were a VAX ripoff.
Question, thererfore, to anyone in a position to know or evaluate: Is Windows NT / Windows 2000 a flavor of VAX? An OS built on a subset of VAX infrastructures? VAX with a Windows face on it, in the same sense that MacOS X is BSD Unix with a Mac fact on it? A Microsoft OS with a small number of questionable borrowings or reverse-engineered copycattings of VAX processes built into it? A fully homegrown Microsoft OS that was defamed by Digital in untrue allegations? A fully homegrown Microsoft OS that was never mentioned by Digital but for unknown reasons defamed by a computer-news columnist who made these claims?
It does strike me that if Microsoft developed the NT operating system from scratch, that makes one for them.
I once read that NT is actually closer to IBM’s OS/2 - from what I remember the situation was that Microsoft and IBM were jointly working on the successor to DOS when Microsoft left the project to concentrate on Windows. IBM and Microsoft both finished the project individually, with IBM creating OS/2 and MS creating NT.
The way the rumor goes is that the VMS group in DEC was working on a port of VMS to the intel architecture to compete with DOS/Windows. DEC pulled the plug on this project. The programmers got pissed and went to work en masse at Microsoft. They incremented each letter in VMS and called the new os WNT. They did not actually rip off source code, but they had it all basicly in thier heads. Microsoft eventually renamed WNT to Windows/NT.
But like I said, this was the rumor I heard. No first hand knowledge or anything.
Yep, so the story goes, about a dozen programmers left DEC and brought the core OS structure to MS. NT’s threading model to this day is based on OpenVMS.
Instead of suing, DEC agreed to let MS port NT to the Alpha, so Alphas would start to sell. It was an abysmal failure.
That VMS -> WNT thing sounds to my ears like a strained adaptation of a gag in Clark’s 2001: A Space Oddesy. The idea was that a bunch of programmers left IBM to found the HAL computer company (one step ahead of IBM), but insisted that HAL was really just an abbreviation for Heuristically ALgorithmed. Either this is a startlingly accurate prediction made by Clark, or a hoax based on a coincidence started by one of his fans. I’m inclined towards the latter.
Besides, the various Microsoft operating systems show a lot more influence from UNIX than from VMS, yet I’ll bet you’ve never seen VOJY.