
Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998) - wolfgke
https://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story
======
EamonnMR
For a detailed account, there's always _Show Stopper!_ by G. Pascal Zachary
which is a shot at writing a _Soul of the new Machine_ style book about
Microsoft during the creation of NT. If that sort of story entertains you, I
recommend it.

~~~
pjungwir
Can someone tell me what is so great about SotNM? (It even won a Pulitzer.) I
read a bunch of computer history books last year, and these were all more
interesting IMO:

\- John Gernter, The Idea Factory

\- T.R. Reid, The Chip

\- Stephen Levy, Hackers

\- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

\- Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning

\- Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work

(Actually I read Levy & Lammers a long time ago, but they're both better than
SotNM too.)

Those were full of themes like patents and broad use of technology,
interaction between government and private enterprise, monopolies, private
research institutes and the need for profit, challenges commercializing your
discoveries, the culture around early computer use, etc. They had profiles of
famous computer pioneers. They told the history of tech I use every day.

SotNM didn't have anyone I recognized and was about a machine I'd never heard
of before. Its biggest theme was how overworked the engineers were (also
present in those other books, but not as dominant), at the cost of their
health and marriages, with little-to-no reward. It was monotonous and
depressing.

So what did other people appreciate about it? With books I don't expect to
always "see" everything there on my own, so maybe someone can help me learn
what I'm missing.

~~~
EamonnMR
I actually like SoTM the best out of the list you've posted. More so than the
others it's a study of the everyday people of technology, not just the heroes
that we've all heard of. Dealers of Lightning, Hackers, and Where Wizards Stay
Up Late all do a fine job of telling human stories of technology you use, but
SoTM is mainly about the day-to-day life in an industry, the triumphs and
failures on a much smaller, more human scale. A similar book could have been
written about companies I've worked at, and I'm sure everyone here can say the
same. It's less of a history and more of a study of people.

I enjoy this genera though, and I'll add Gertner and Lammers to the list. You
may want to try Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley (about phone phreaking)
and The New New Thing by Michael Lweis.

~~~
pjungwir
Thanks! I'll rethink SotNM some in light of that. I did enjoy the parts about
"signing up" and the software/hardware interaction (although I wished for more
technical details about that.) I didn't think it was _bad_ btw, just not as
rich as the others. Also after I wrote that comment I thought, "Monotony isn't
always bad. The Iliad and Symphony of Sorrowful Songs are monotonous too.
Maybe the form is expressing the long slog of the project." :-) Thanks also
for the new recommendations!

------
saul_goodman
"Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because
Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2
API as its primary interface."

Right... There's another reason why it was originally called OS/2 NT: IBM had
hired Microsoft to co-develop OS/2 with them before Windows NT development had
begun (as early as 1985). The reason for a resemblence to OS/2 with the name
and API compatibility would seem to be so that Microsoft could develop the NT
product as "OS/2" which could be charged back to IBM. So, effectively, IBM was
unknowingly paying for a chunk of NT development. By the time IBM realized
they were getting worked over it was too late, they had already been taken for
a ride by Microsoft. They lost in two ways: they lost the the desktop market
to Windows which shipped pre-installed on nearly all consumer PC's, and paying
for dev work on OS/2 1.3 which really was going into NT product). So IBM took
OS/2 development back in-house in 1990 and licked their wounds, but it was too
late by then. Except for the embedded market, OS/2 had lost.

~~~
pjmlp
Well, it helped that a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make
virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to
go with OS/2.

It has been several years, but I think the story is described here
"Unauthorized Windows 95", I no longer have the book.

[http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-
windows...](http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows-95/)

~~~
yuhong
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=98745)

One of the problems with running 16-bit programs directly in Win9x was the
Win16Mutex, BTW.

~~~
mschaef
To some extent, _every_ Windows program on Win95 was a 16-bit program. (There
was a lot of the 32-bit API that was built by thunking down to 16- bit
equivalents.... one notable example was that Windows95 notepad was still
limited to 32K files, etc.)

------
GeekyBear
One of the things that makes this article interesting is the fact that it was
written by the current CTO of Microsoft Azure.

He wrote extensively about Windows NT back in the day.

~~~
teh_klev
Also Mark Russinovich was the author of many life saving SysInternals tools
and utilities[0]. He was also the author of the original Windows Internals
books.

[0]: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
gb/sysinternals/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/)

~~~
Analemma_
A persistent rumor is that Microsoft bought Winternals partly because
Russinovich knew the guts of Windows better than a lot of their own engineers
did.

~~~
squarefoot
According to the Wikipedia article, it looks like more of an embrace and
extinguish move, at least regarding the utilities sources and Linux
development.

"However, since the Microsoft acquisition, none of the utilities currently
available are accompanied by source code, and the Linux versions are no longer
maintained or available.

Some of the coding tricks used were based on the Windows Native API (NTAPI),
which was (and still is) mostly undocumented by Microsoft. Using these coding
examples - with source - would enable developers to create extraordinary
programs that performed operations that would otherwise have been impossible
using a standard API. Examples include hiding Registry information,
intercepting or hooking APIs to monitor file operations by the OS, as well as
Registry operations."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals)

~~~
teh_klev
Hmm...random person on the internet adds citation free conspiracy theory with
the description of the edit as:

"Describing the non-availability of source code since the Microsoft
aquisition. Under 'Source Code and Technology' header ( _my experience as a
developer_ )" [My emphasis in italics]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sysinternals&diff...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sysinternals&diff=prev&oldid=157066245)

The reality was that only a handful of the less interesting of these utilities
came with source code:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060829135539/http://www.sysinte...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060829135539/http://www.sysinternals.com/SourceCode.html)

------
zargon
My high school had a VAX in the '90s that served a whole lab of terminals and
was available over dial-up. A lot of my early programming was on that machine.
Later I bought a VAX off ebay, joined DEC's VMS hobbyist program and provided
free accounts to people at HobbesNet
([https://web.archive.org/web/20050125003015/http://hobbesnet....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050125003015/http://hobbesnet.org:80/)).
I kinda regret getting rid of those machines now. It looks like the Deathrow
cluster is gone now too
([https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html](https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html)).

~~~
dboreham
I bought a couple of VAXStations on eBay in 2004 with the idea to preserve the
"VMS experience". I got one of them up and running with the then current VMS
version, and connected to the Internet. They're still sitting in my office,
not powered on in 14 years.

~~~
michrassena
I have two VS 3100s that I keep intending to install VMS on. I used VMS in my
first year of college, and there's been nothing quite like the versioning file
system to come along since.

~~~
michrassena
Just a note for those unfamiliar with this hardware, the VaxStation 3100 38
(the model I own) was produced in 1989. My configuration has 24MB of memory
(Max was 32MB). The 32-bit CISC processor runs at 16Mhz. I don't know how it
compares to contemporary workstations, like those from Sun or SGI, but
compared to PCs at the time it was much more powerful. These workstations must
have cost tens of thousands when new. I bought mine for $10 each at least 15
years ago, sans hard drive.

------
rpiguy
What I find interesting is that PC-DOS (MS-DOS) was also a mostly clean room
copy of CP/M.

The guy who wrote it before Microsoft acquired it literally went through a
CP/M programming manual and recreated the system calls for x86, changing a
name here or there.

Neat parallel to how NT doesn't copy any VMS code, but still essentially
copies VMS in several aspects.

~~~
nineteen999
There was a nice analysis of this done by Bob Zeidman where he compared the
released CP/M 2.0 and DOS 2.0 source code. His basic conclusion was that
source and basic commands were not copied, but that a large number of the
system calls were copied.

[https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...](https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=71259)

------
vt240
I'm still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZN6LjuEgdw&t)

~~~
wazoox
Maybe give freeVMS a try :) It's an old (crazy) friend of mine who did it...

~~~
vt240
I remember messing around with that ages ago. I wonder if any of the
contributors ended up working with VMS Software on the port. It looks, from
their site, like they are getting close.

~~~
beefhash
> It looks, from their site, like they are getting close.

Does it? It looks to me that the last commit was almost five years ago[1].

[1]
[http://www.freevms.net/gitweb/?p=FreeVMS.git;a=summary](http://www.freevms.net/gitweb/?p=FreeVMS.git;a=summary)

~~~
wazoox
Yeah, but maybe a little spark of interest could re-lit the flame :)

------
AceJohnny2
Offtopic, the print version of the page is so much more readable:

[https://www.itprotoday.com/print/24541](https://www.itprotoday.com/print/24541)

It'll automatically bring up the print dialog, though, which you'll have to
dismiss.

------
julian55
My first job was working on RSX11M (predecessor to VMS) on a PDP-11. One thing
that I remember is that the virtual address space of a process was 64K (i.e.
16 bit address) but the machine had 256K of RAM. I never used VMS as by that
time I'd moved from minicomputers to microprocessors.

------
bediger4000
Around 1996/97 I heard two very similar rumors, from two people who did not
know each other. Both rumors had it that the NT source at that time was at
least in some part the source of "Micah", the OS that Dave Cutler and crew had
been working on for the Prism architecture. The NT source still had DEC
copyrights and mentions of Micah in it. That's why DEC had such a weird deal
with Microsoft, and why there was an Alpha AXP port of NT long after all other
architectures went by the wayside.

As far as credibility of this rumor, if you have a copy of "Inside the Windows
NT file system" ([https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-NT-File-
System/dp/1556...](https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-NT-File-
System/dp/155615660X)) by Helen Custer, you'll see a more than passing
resemblance of NTFS to ODS-2, the on-disk layout of VMS filesystem. G. Pascal
Zachary has a big chapter on the development of NTFS, if I recall
"Showstopper!" correctly, but he doesn't mention this... coincidence at all,
giving full credit for NTFS to a couple of guys on the NT team.

------
dtmmax33
"VMS included a utility called BACKUP long before Microsoft developed NT's
backup utility."

Did Microsoft ever create a backup utility? I can't remember who did the NT
3.51, but 4.0 used Seagate Software for the backup app.

~~~
JdeBP
Yes. MS/PC-DOS version 2 came with BACKUP and RESTORE commands, for starters.

------
classichasclass
I remember the jokes about AXP being "Almost eXactly Prism" even though this
was a rather unfair oversimplification.

------
RachelF
Odd fact: VMS is to WNT as HAL is to IBM.

~~~
ch_123
As the article points out, when Cutler et al. started at Microsoft, the
project was already called NT OS/2\. The WNT name came much later.

------
Royal
NT doesn't have a hovercraft full of eels though.

------
jacksmith21006
My all time favorite OS is VMS. Spent 100s of hours on VMS internals.

But now many years later have to admit VMS was just a lot more complicated
than what was needed.

------
eej71
Interesting that this story rises to the top. Curious what draws people to it?

~~~
chaotic_clanger
i must say i find it very interesting and maybe a bit ironic that nt is built
on pirated sources (and architecture)

~~~
swagtricker
They didn't copy directly, they just re-implemented from memory. I worked for
Digital right out of college at the "DEC West" site off 520. A number of my
co-workers REALLY hated Microsoft. Swore up & down they had colleges who had
seen NT source code when they started working together with Microsoft on
"Wolfpack" server clustering that they were using the exact same terms &
constants (e.g. structs for system values were identical). Dave Cutler & his
crowd were not popular. That $60M - $100M was payoff money to avoid a very
public & very nasty copyright suit. And back then, $60M - $100M was considered
real money.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Reminder that MS paid off Wang for the stolen OLE technology and that they
stole from Stac / Stacker Technology also. They are better behaved now...

~~~
hfdgiutdryg
_they stole from Stac / Stacker Technology_

Did they really? I thought MS just implemented their own version of the tech
and was accused of violating patents. Did they actually steal IP?

Reading the Wikipedia article, it's not really clear what happened. Looks like
MS review Stac code during licensing talks, but there's no mention of
accusations of code theft. Then there's discussion of patent violation
lawsuits and payoffs going both directions.

------
EdSharkey
I wonder how relevant the NT kernel is nowadays. My impression is the kernel
as a foundation is that it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the windows
structures atop it are eternally collapsing and rotted in parts.

With the introduction of the windows subsystem for linux, the whole edifice is
coming down, threatening to bury the NT kernel and render it obsolete.

It seems Microsoft has capitulated and competition has been reduced to "'Doing
Linux' better than linux". Which is to say, "We surrender! There is no plan.
Start migrating away from our legacy tech; here is a path."

What's the point in continuing development on and for Windows if it no longer
offers (and demands) technological distinctiveness? There is no point.

~~~
WorldMaker
It seems just the opposite to me. The Windows Subsystem for Linux seems a
testament to the NT Kernel and its deliberate approach from nearly three
decades ago. Designed originally to support Win32, POSIX, and OS/2 frontends,
for a long time it only ever really needed to exercise one of those things.
Now it has the best POSIX layer it has ever had, focusing on byte-for-byte
compatibility with binaries targeting the Linux kernel. That's incredible
power, and the idea that the NT Kernel is doing it almost like running any
other application is fascinating. If the NT Kernel is "Doing Linux better than
Linux", that's a fascinating statement, because the NT Kernel is also running
Win32, UWP, and all of its own chores at the same time. What's the Linux
kernel doing? ;P

Sure, Win32 is a beast now past retirement, and Microsoft has been trying to
help that retirement happen sooner rather than later with UWP, but again, that
seems a testament to the underlying NT kernel, because the NT kernel doesn't
care, it's still chugging along doing its thing and doing it well. It's also
running on more hardware combinations and more processor architectures than
most other kernels could dream of touching.

~~~
dblohm7
I don't think we'll ever see Win32 retired. .NET and UWP aren't distinct
subsystems; they run atop Win32.

~~~
WorldMaker
Sure, there will always be legacy Win32 apps. I work with too many VB6
applications to be more optimistic about that.

UWP is closer to being a distinct subsystem than "running atop Win32". Though
it isn't an official subsystem, it has some of the hallmarks of one (and that
was one of the complaints about Windows 8). They've been successfully blurring
the lines between UWP and Win32 since Windows 8, but it's also not entirely
accurate to state that UWP "runs atop Win32". (The old .NET Framework does,
yes, but I didn't mention the .NET Framework, I mentioned UWP.)

If anything, with increasingly more of the Windows Shell moving to UWP, it may
even start to be increasingly the case that it is Win32 running atop UWP.

~~~
dblohm7
COM is dependent on Win32, and UWP is based on COM.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
COM itself is quite small, sure there are a lot of components that implement
COM and use Win32 but I don't think it would take much to port COM itself to
another platform.

~~~
WorldMaker
COM itself as a format/standard is Win32 agnostic other than being built on
some similar data structures to Win32.

Also, WinRT isn't COM. It's very like COM, "son of COM and .NET metadata" and
all that, but WinRT and all the WinRT components don't use Win32 and never
have, and even have a quite clean break with all of the Win32 data structures
COM has embedded in the past.

(Though, I suppose some of that starts to get into the semantic weeds of
whether or not you consider DirectX a part of "Win32" or not, as for instance
XAML is built on DirectX and much of DirectX is provided as WinRT components,
sort of. There are certainly a lot of Win32-adjacent things that live in all
worlds like DirectX, but whether or not they can be considered Win32 is an
interesting philosophical debate.)

