[mbennett]

>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.

A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.

From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros...

>Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.

>To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.

>It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."

[pjmlp]

Yes, many like to bash Windows, but the NT family is actually a VMS at heart, spoiled by a not so good user land experience.

I once attend a session by him about the Windows kernel design, quite interesting.

[gjm11]

VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way as IBM - 1 = HAL.

(So far as I know, both of these are just amusing coincidences.)

[pjmlp]

I once went through the VMS documentation, and could at least find some of the design ideas that I knew from Windows NT.

I think it is good that the industry enjoys different types of OS architectures and designs.

Just because UNIX managed to spread as it did, doesn't mean it is the be all of OS design. After all, its creators tried to fix UNIX, just the industry did not adopted it.

[icefox]

In the 2001 audio book Arthur C Clarke had a 15 minute intro where in it (amung other things) he explicitly says it is a coincidences and lists the page in the book explaining what HAL stands for.

[zenbowman]

Thanks for the tale, heartwarming to hear that he is still at Microsoft. In my view some of the best work in our industry has come from lifers (or at least long-timers).

[protomyth]

I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and security.

[gaius]

One thing VMS was not was quirky, DEC went to considerable effort to make everything consistent. If you didn't know a command you could guess it, and it would take the same switches as any other command. Contrast that with Unix whose commands really are quirky...

[protomyth]

Given by background was UNIX, it certainly felt quirky, but it was very consistent. The "why the heck are there 4 of the same file" moment is a little odd. It was a good OS.

[wazoox]

A friend of mine (who is a huge VMS fan) wrote this: http://www.freevms.net/