AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System

[Fats]

Yep, since AT&T and Bell Labs were a legal monopoly under strict federal supervision Unix probably should be a public domain commodity.

Although that the BSD's are not public domain they have a quite permissive license...

[Fats]

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

Looking at so called similarities in table 2 in the article you could probably as well put a UNIX kernel feature next to it and have a similar table. NT is just a product from the common knowledge of OS design at that time.

[Fats]

@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.

I did not try to claim NT was not influenced by VMS; if one has been programming a kernel in a previous job you'll likely use techniques and solutions you are familiar with.
I do claim that it was influenced by a lot of OSes and not solely or mainly by VMS as I got the impression some people tried to claim that. What I wanted to say is that you can easily write a similar story of proofing Windows NT is heavily influenced by UNIX.