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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)

#21

Post by patrickg_zill »

swagtricker wrote: post #11
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)

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 w…

Reminder that MS paid off Wang for the stolen OLE technology and that they stole from Stac / Stacker Technology also. They are better behaved now...

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

#23

Post by vxNsr »

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.

That's a little disingenuous. The "recipe ideas" were from the same minds that came up with them originally. This comes down to who really owns an idea, the entity that paid for it or the mind that thought it.

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

#24

Post by polpo »

GeekyBear wrote: post #17

One of the things that makes this article interesting is the fact that it was written by the current CTO of Microsoft Azure. He wrote extensively about Windows NT back in the day.

Also interesting is that Dave Cutler, architect of NT and VMS, was the first lead on Azure.

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

#25

Post by teh_klev »

GeekyBear wrote: post #17

One of the things that makes this article interesting is the fact that it was written by the current CTO of Microsoft Azure. He wrote extensively about Windows NT back in the day.

Also Mark Russinovich was the author of many life saving SysInternals tools and utilities[0]. He was also the author of the original Windows Internals books.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/

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

#26

Post by teh_klev »

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.

Both those books are excellent. I first read Soul of a New Machine back in the 80's when I was a spotty young apprentice Data General engineer learning how to repair Nova's and Eclipse S-series machines.

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

#27

Post by michrassena »

dboreham wrote: post #19
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.

I have two VS 3100s that I keep intending to install VMS on. I used VMS in my first year of college, and there's been nothing quite like the versioning file system to come along since.

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

#28

Post by vt240 »

wazoox wrote: post #22
vt240 wrote: post #15

I'm still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t

Maybe give freeVMS a try :) It's an old (crazy) friend of mine who did it...

I remember messing around with that ages ago. I wonder if any of the contributors ended up working with VMS Software on the port. It looks, from their site, like they are getting close.

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

#29

Post by nickpsecurity »

vt240 wrote: post #15

I'm still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t

"trn" on Lobste.rs has been posting the company's slide decks about their progress. A recent one, "Proof Points to x86 Boot," shows they're getting close:

http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html

See "History of the Port" in bottom right for older posts. You might want to do it bottom-up going from oldest to newest. Also, a few things trn posted indicated they were doing non-x86 work like Alpha releases, too. Example below:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/07/prweb14487932.htm

So, it looks like they've been modernizing all three platforms instead of just porting to x86.

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