[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[John Wallace]

On Nov 10, 2:35 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> jls schrieb:
>
>
>
> > My recollection from that time period is reading a few articles
> > written in mags from erstwhile VMS Internals experts that NT had VMS
> > written all over it.
>
> > It may not be so true today, but the earlier versions, IIRC, were so
> > VMS-ish internally that even some of the code was copied verbatim
> > (i.e., including comments with the initials of VMS engineers).
>
> If WNT == VMS++
> then how comes that the allegedly unhackable OS
> turned into the most hacked one?
> And how comes that absolutely nothing reminds me of
> VMS whenever I have to touch a Windoze box?

A couple of reasons spring to mind. You can probably read more about
them in Custer's book.

When NT was first proposed, all it really had in common with the 16bit
Windows 3.1 of the day was the name. Compatibility with DOS or Win16
was barely a goal. As time goes by, Gates realises a couple of things:
the new OS needs to be more compatible with its predecessors, both in
API terms and in look+feel terms. Gates also realises that on the
hardware of the day, the new OS is going to be SLOWer than the Win16
of the day, and he cannot be having that (this was long before Vista)
even though the new crash-resistant OS would actually be more
productive despite individual benchmarks being slower. So, concepts
such as security are thrown out of the window; e.g. suddenly all kinds
of drivers that don't need to be kernel mode in a common address space
are running in kernel mode in a common address space to make the
system run a bit faster by avoiding context switches and parameter
copying. But the crashes came back and the security went down the
tubes.

The look and feel? DOS box compatibility rather than DCL. VMS's GUI
was X based, Windows wasn't.

Etc.