What to Do with a PS/2?

[Liam Proven]

On 27 January 2016 at 18:38, js at cimmeri.com <js at cimmeri.com> wrote:
> Correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly (probably am), but wasn't NT a
> descendent of DEC VMS?

Oversimplifying freely:

DEC OS team lead Dave Cutler wanted to take VAX/VMS multi-platform.
DEC rejected this. So he allowed himself and his core team leads to be
headhunted by Microsoft.

Microsoft had recently fallen out with IBM over OS/2. OS/2 1.x was a
joint MS/IBM development. IBM kept the 80386 version, OS/2 2.x. MS got
the portable, CPU-independent version, OS/2 3.x, which was barely more
than a skeleton draft at that point.

MS hired Cutler and gave him the OS/2 3 project. Cutler & his team
retained some of it, but redid a lot, reusing ideas, concepts and even
filenames from VMS -- but no code, obviously.

The result was named "Windows NT".

Entertainingly, WNT is what you get if you shift the letters of 'VMS"
1 position forward in the alphabet.

Actually, though, it was developed on multiple CPU platforms, and one
was an in-house board design based around Intel's RISC chip, the i860
-- codenamed the N10. NT allegedly stood for "N Ten" before MS
marketing retconned it to "New Technology".

-- 
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