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Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

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Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#11

Post by swagtricker »

chaotic_clanger wrote: post #5
eej71 wrote: post #2

Interesting that this story rises to the top. Curious what draws people to it?

i must say i find it very interesting and maybe a bit ironic that nt is built on pirated sources (and architecture)

They didn't copy directly, they just re-implemented from memory. I worked for Digital right out of college at the "DEC West" site off 520. A number of my co-workers REALLY hated Microsoft. Swore up & down they had colleges who had seen NT source code when they started working together with Microsoft on "Wolfpack" server clustering that they were using the exact same terms & constants (e.g. structs for system values were identical). Dave Cutler & his crowd were not popular. That $60M - $100M was payoff money to avoid a very public & very nasty copyright suit. And back then, $60M - $100M was considered real money.

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#12

Post by swagtricker »

atombender wrote: post #8
chaotic_clanger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i must say i find it very interesting and maybe a bit ironic that nt is built on pirated sources (and architecture)

It wasn't. NT was built from scratch.

Written from scratch? Maybe. But they sure as hell didn't get it done without stealing some key "recipe ideas" from VMS.

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#13

Post by julian55 »

My first job was working on RSX11M (predecessor to VMS) on a PDP-11. One thing that I remember is that the virtual address space of a process was 64K (i.e. 16 bit address) but the machine had 256K of RAM. I never used VMS as by that time I'd moved from minicomputers to microprocessors.

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#14

Post by icedchai »

swagtricker wrote: post #12
atombender wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't. NT was built from scratch.

Written from scratch? Maybe. But they sure as hell didn't get it done without stealing some key "recipe ideas" from VMS.

It was the same architect and some of the same team. Those ideas came from those people originally. Of course there will be similarities!

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#16

Post by enitihas »

EamonnMR wrote: post #3

For a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I recommend it.

Showstoppers is a really good book, not just about NT and it's history, but in my experience it gives a good overview of how such a large scale project looks from the point of view of everyone involved, including the CEO and people working on some specific modules.

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#18

Post by kerng »

EamonnMR wrote: post #3

For a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I recommend it.

I remember reading it about 10 years ago and found it quite fascinating. It goes into a level of personal detail on people involved, not solely technical but also tells what happened on a personal and emotion level. Pretty insightful in understanding how NT was built.

Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

#19

Post by dboreham »

zargon wrote: post #10

My high school had a VAX in the '90s that served a whole lab of terminals and was available over dial-up. A lot of my early programming was on that machine. Later I bought a VAX off ebay, joined DEC's VMS hobbyist program and provided free accounts to people at HobbesNet ( https://web.archive.org/web/20050125003015/http://hobbesnet.... ). I kinda regret getting rid of those machines now. It looks like the Deathrow cl…

I bought a couple of VAXStations on eBay in 2004 with the idea to preserve the "VMS experience". I got one of them up and running with the then current VMS version, and connected to the Internet. They're still sitting in my office, not powered on in 14 years.
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