[temac]

Cutler developed VMS, and then went to MS and developped NT. NT is not a modified version of VMS, although some principle are obvious common.

At the very beginning, NT was developed as NT OS/2, targeted for OS/2 v3.

Then MS and IBM parted ways, and NT was retargeted to Windows NT (with a Win32 API as the main userspace). Then initial plan was already to be able to support the OS/2 API and at least Win16, anyway, so the idea of classic NT subsystem could be leveraged and the retargeting was not too painful. Also, IIRC it happened relatively early in the development process.

At the very beginning, the initial team used OS/2 hosts, because obviously they had to have some dev hosts... But soon enough they self-hosted. The idea that they did not want to is far fetched. At most maybe they did not want to do that too early, which is understandable. NT was soon vastly superior to OS/2, so I can not imagine any reason for devs to want to stick to that legacy host...

[nickpsecurity]

"NT is not a modified version of VMS, although some principle are obvious common."

Russinovich claimed it is in the linked article with evidence they even have similar internals just renamed. He's the goto guy for information on Windows Internals. DEC claimed same thing in lawauit. So, what evidence do you have that Windows NT kernel wasn't a reimplementation of OpenVMS design with modifications?

[MarkKB]

You claimed that Windows NT was VMS with modifications. That's not what Russinovich claims - he claims that the internal design is very similar to VMS, and thus NT's design was most likely heavily inspired by VMS's. "Architectural and design influences" is the strongest claim Russinovich makes in the article as to the link between NT and VMS.

In a similar way, Microsoft Word no doubt has "architectural and design influences" with Bravo (thanks to Charles Simonyi), but it would be false to conclude that Word is "a modified version of Bravo".