The story, as I understand it, is this.
The VMS guys came up with a new kernal. They asked DEC to support it. The kernal guys were in Seattle. DEC said, move to Boston and we don’t like the idea.
The team lead at DEC went to Bill Gates and said they had an idea for O/S. Bill G said cool, and hired them en masse. Win NT came out which had NOTHING in common with Windows but some screens. But people think they are connected.
You still have folks that think that Windows is based on DOS. It isn’t. It is based on VMS. The last DOS Windows was Windows ME and even it wasn’t that DOS based.
Hence, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7 are all VMS products with a deep lineage. And VMS is a mainframe system with similarities to zOS. It lifted functionality from IBM.
Ah well. Getting gray hair in this industry.
I laugh at the Mac freaks how they say they don't even need virus or firewall protection, “Cus, their Mac is soooo bullet proof and flawlessly awesome, that hackers run in fear when they even see the name.”
But, back to the DEC thing. I know a little history about Microsoft myself. How they first went to Altair to get a foothold on developing an OS. And what launched them over the top was them getting the IBM compatible OS that NEC (Japan) was selling worldwide by the Millions.
Apple decided that they would remain exclusive and push red diaper doper baby home computers like the “Wendy”.
(Your rendition of the Mac user was classic, LOL!)
Not exactly.
Cutler wanted to re-write VMS in C to make it more portable to target new architectures quicker. Cutler hated Unix, but loved the idea of a better OS implementation language than Bliss, and he wanted to re-host VMS on some of the hot new RISC chips that were coming of age in Unix workstations in the early 90’s. It is difficult to tell younger people what the prevailing notions of systems programming were in the 70’s - and that IBM and DEC (and others) had their own home-rolled systems programming languages for their OS projects. DEC had Bliss-11, Bliss-32, Common Bliss, etc, just as IBM had PL/S, etc.
DEC, never missing an opportunity to shoot themselves in the feet where workstations and PC’s were concerned, sufficiently pissed off Cutler that he left. Part of the reason this happened was that DEC was a Massachusetts company. If you weren’t at “The Mill,” you simply were not politically connected. Cutler was at DECwest in Seattle, and just not “in the loop.” So he just wasn’t able to market his idea to the increasingly sales/marketing managed DEC in the early 90’s and left the reservation.
That said, while the IO architecture of WinNT shows VMS parentage, the security aspects of VMS were almost all left behind. VMS had real security. Windows has very little of any of VMS’ security architecture, and the results show this.