On 12 June 2011 16:53, suprengr <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'll try that again... sent draft not real - whoops & sorry! > > In case you're wondering why Windows NT was given that name.... > There used to be a best-in-breed mainframe sys called VMS... > Microsoft's idea was to "go one better" and add one letter to each > initial to prove it! > they added "1" to V, "!" to M & "1" to S: > one letter up [from VMS] to each of the intials = WNT!
We heard you the 1st time! ;¬) I believe that is an urban legend, although Dave Cutler, the lead architect of NT at MS, was also the project lead on VMS & earlier DEC OSs. VMS ran originally on the VAX, incidentally, a minicomputer, not a mainframe. There are various resemblances between NT and VMS at a low level. NT was built on the foundations of the original OS/2 3, after MS & IBM fell out. IBM kept OS/2 2, the 80386 version; MS got the portable version. It foundered until MS head-hunted Cutler from DEC. He was frustrated as DEC management had red-lighted his project to create a portable, cross-platform version of VMS. (I think it was called "PRISM".) NT was originally not developed on x86 - that was OS/2 2 territory. It was developed for the Intel RISC chip, the i860, a general-purpose RISC chip partly descended from the earlier i960, an embedded chip. The i860 was codenamed N10: n-ten, or NT for short. That's where the "NT" came from. Source: Bill Gates in a 1988 interview. :¬) -- Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected] Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: [email protected] • ICQ: 73187508 -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
