AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System

[ferrellsl]

Oops...LoadWB beat me to the punch regarding the crap on Wikipedia....

@Pentad
I'm sorry but you're wrong about NT's roots. And to use Wikipedia as a reference to back you up is laughable and would get you thrown out of any bachelor or masters program for obvious reasons. NT was heavily influenced by VMS and it's designers.  Bill Cutler, the primary designer of VMS was hired by Bill Gates in 1988 along with 20 other former DEC engineers to write NT.  Microsoft developers wrote NT's kernel almost entirely in C. In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaned it up, tuned, tweaked, and added some new functionality and capabilities as they went. The migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, engineers still working at Digital noticed the similarities.

My source is Mark Russinovich, a writer working for Microsoft Press:  http://windowsitpro.com/author/mark-russinovich
So even Microsoft admits that NT was based heavily on VAX/VMS technology.
More info about VMS and its influence on NT can be found here, thanks to Mark:  
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story

[ferrellsl]

@Fats

You obviously didn't read the article from Microsoft Press if you still feel that NT was just an "influenced" product based on the common knowledge of other OS's at that time. And I made no mention of Unix at all in my post.  I was clarifying Pentad's assertion that NT was not based on VMS, which clearly it is based on VMS.....straight from the mouth of Microsoft.

[ferrellsl]

@nicholas

You got that right!