OS/2 (was: OT! Re: [TriLUG] Defeated by a website..)

Dan Monjar dan at daijin.dissimulo.com
Sat Jan 1 21:12:58 EST 2005


Kevin Flanagan wrote:

>On Friday 31 December 2004 01:23 pm, Scott G. Hall wrote:
>
>  
>
>>OS/2 originally started as a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft.
>>When Microsoft could not take the terms of the deal anymore, they
>>forked their own variation, called Win-NT.
>>
>>    
>>
>It's always been my understanding, and I've been intimately involved with NT 
>in all of it's varieties, that NT was a clean build from OS/2. 
>
>Dave Cutler worked for DEC, created RSX/11 and VMS there, his next project was 
>code named prism, when that project was cancelled he went over to Microsoft 
>and created NT.  I continue to find things in Windows 2003 Server that are 
>almost direct ports from VMS.  Did you know that starting with 2003 Server 
>you can adjust "Quantum", the slice of time a process gets when it gets it's 
>turn "on processor".  That's something that we did adjust on VMS systems back 
>in the 80's.  There are Registry keys that are almost directly taken from 
>VMS, IRP stack size is adjustable, think network buffers.    Most likely none 
>of this is all that interesting to the Linux community, except for the 
>general geekiness of it all.  ;')
>
>It's been my understanding that they took most of the same talent from the 
>OS/2 dev team, and started over with Dave's leadership.
>
>
>Then again, I could be wrong.....
>  
>
Don't think so... there's a book out about the creation of NT called 
"Showstopper!" that details this creation and your Dave Cutler history 
is accurate.  I've been working with VMS since 1986 and still have a 
couple of VMS 6.2 systems running.  There is a lot of stuff underneath 
the hood of NT that directly relates to VMS.

BTW, back in the day the default 'quanta' was 20ms... seems kind of a 
long time now ;-)



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