On 1/27/2016 1:14 PM, John Willis wrote:
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.
In relation to that, here's something
interesting:
http://toastytech.com/guis/wps.html
- J.
