> > > Correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly (probably am), but wasn't > > NT a descendent of DEC VMS? > > As I understand it - an important caveat here - Windows NT was to some > extent a conceptual descendent of VMS, but that was more because the > same person was instrumental in designing both than because there was > an explicit inheritance relationship. > > That would be Dave Cutler. You can see his philosophy clearly in both systems. And he had little respect for Gordon Letwin and the OS/2 architecture, and open disdain for UNIX and its underlying stream-of-bytes, everything-is-a-file, everything-is-plaintext philosophy. IMO, NT offers a better kernel than OS/2, but nothing has ever matched the elegance and sheer power of the Workplace Shell as a graphical abstraction.
Windows overall suffers from layers upon layers of ill-conceived backwards compatibility hacks and Microsoft's inability to settle on one API, as well as horrendously weak versioning of shared libraries (the Component Object Model is a nightmare). IUnknown, anyone?