Odd fact: VMS is to WNT as HAL is to IBM.
As the article points out, when Cutler et al. started at Microsoft, the project was already called NT OS/2. The WNT name came much later.
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)
#92"VMS included a utility called BACKUP long before Microsoft developed NT's backup utility." Did Microsoft ever create a backup utility? I can't remember who did the NT 3.51, but 4.0 used Seagate Software for the backup app.
Yes. MS/PC-DOS version 2 came with BACKUP and RESTORE commands, for starters.
Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, there will always be legacy Win32 apps. I work with too many VB6 applications to be more optimistic about that. UWP is closer to being a distinct subsystem than "running atop Win32". Though it isn't an official subsystem, it has some of the hallmarks of one (and that was one of the complaints about Windows 8). They've been successfully blurring the lines between UWP and Win32 since Windows 8, but it's also not…
COM is dependent on Win32, and UWP is based on COM.
COM itself is quite small, sure there are a lot of components that implement COM and use Win32 but I don't think it would take much to port COM itself to another platform.
Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>than most other kernels could dream of Except Linux.
NT pretty much only runs on x86 and ARM (yes, yes, 32- and 64-bit variants of both). yawn Almost ever other OS out there allows for more. Linux, (Free|Open|Net)BSD, illumos, AROS... hell, even ReactOS has had ports to architectures Windows has never dreamed of :)
The Xbox 360 has a Windows NT-kernel and IIRC it runs with a PowerPC-based CPU. Older NT-kernels were available for PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha. Your point is still valid, though.
Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
COM is dependent on Win32, and UWP is based on COM.
COM itself is quite small, sure there are a lot of components that implement COM and use Win32 but I don't think it would take much to port COM itself to another platform.
COM itself as a format/standard is Win32 agnostic other than being built on some similar data structures to Win32.
Also, WinRT isn't COM. It's very like COM, "son of COM and .NET metadata" and all that, but WinRT and all the WinRT components don't use Win32 and never have, and even have a quite clean break with all of the Win32 data structures COM has embedded in the past.
(Though, I suppose some of that starts to get into the semantic weeds of whether or not you consider DirectX a part of "Win32" or not, as for instance XAML is built on DirectX and much of DirectX is provided as WinRT components, sort of. There are certainly a lot of Win32-adjacent things that live in all worlds like DirectX, but whether or not they can be considered Win32 is an interesting philosophical debate.)
Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
COM is dependent on Win32, and UWP is based on COM.
COM itself is quite small, sure there are a lot of components that implement COM and use Win32 but I don't think it would take much to port COM itself to another platform.
It doesn't just use the COM ABI et al. It also uses the distributed bits.
Re: Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)
#97For 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.
Can someone tell me what is so great about SotNM? (It even won a Pulitzer.) I read a bunch of computer history books last year, and these were all more interesting IMO: - John Gernter, The Idea Factory - T.R. Reid, The Chip - Stephen Levy, Hackers - Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning - Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work (Actually I read Levy & Lammers a l…
I found SoaNM interesting because I worked on Data General minis, both the 16-bit ones and the 32-bit ones. You might find it interesting to go back and look at the assumptions Data General worked on in light of what happened within a few years. The design team originally wanted something VAX-like, e.g. with an instruction set designed to make assembly coding easy--RISC made that unfashionable. I also found it interesting that the need to preserve the original instruction set within the new meant that the 32-bit minis were stuck with four general-purpose registers and no register-relative byte addressing.
As far as I know, all that was left of DG was bought up by EMC for the sake of DG's Clariion SANs.