It is my understanding that the original base for NT was
written by Dec (Digital) engineers, and was VMS on a PC,
until Microsoft took it in house.
NT was written by a team of engineers headed up by Dave Cutler who was a
On Fri, 23 May 2003 11:33:01 +0100
Lester Caine wrote:
former engineer at Digital and who worked on VMS. NT was not written by
Digital, per se. However, there are reports that some of the NT code was
taken directly from Digital's VMS code base, comments and all.
While I was never in the VMS group at Digital (I was mostly Unix and
languages), I don't believe that VMS was ever ported to the 386
architecture. It was ported to the Alpha chip in the 90s and has been
ported to the Intel's Itanium chip. It is also possible that Cutler had
started to develop a PC version of VMS on his own before he went to
Microsoft and sold the idea. And, I think one of the reasons that DEC
did not even try to sue Microsoft was that when NT was being developed,
DEC was also participating in the porting of NT to the Alpha chip.
Alpha/NT was released a few weeks after the official release of NT.
--
Jerry Feldman
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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