[Info-vax] Trivia Question about Windows NT

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Sunday, 30 August 2015 02:06:01 UTC+1, abrsvc  wrote:
> On Saturday, August 29, 2015 at 8:52:22 PM UTC-4, john... at triangleexperience.com wrote:
> > Anyone ever hear of the old story about where Windows NT got its name, and who purportedly gave it that name?
> 
> One that I recall is that it was named sort of as a relative to VMS...  Take the letters that follow VMS and you get WNT.
> 
> If you read the internals book about NT, you will find many similarities to VMS.

And if you read Helen Custer's book "Inside Windows NT" and come to it
with an awareness of how VAXELN worked, WNT will look even more like
VAXELN than it looks like VMS.

E.g. At a detail level, where are WNT's ASTs, where are logical names?
And at a big-picture level - VMS is a mostly monolithic setup (one
single kernel address space), WNT originally wasn't, though over time
Gates forced changes towards the monolithic approach, e.g. moving
assorted drivers and subsystems into the kernel for performance
reasons that for security and robustness reasons should have been
isolated from each other.

But fewer people will know VAXELN, and so the Cutler project that
gets the publicity is VMS (it is, after all, still pretty close
even if VAXELN is closer). And the name? Who knows.

I've got earlier related scribblings on the same subject here in
comp.os.vms if it's of interest.

Have a lot of fun.