It's a bit of a stretch to say it was "based on VMS."
Yes the core initial engineers and leadership that started it were ex-DEC engineers.
But if you listen to Dave Cutler's interviews and read about it you can see clearly that some concepts were borrowed but much of the thinking was from scratch. He took the chance of starting a greenfield project to make something far more current.
In particular NT was designed from the ground up to be multiprocessor and multithreading friendly, which is not the case for VMS.
Secondly NT was designed to host multiple OS "personalities", VMS not at all.
Finally NT was designed to be portable between ISAs and they spent years making sure it worked equally well on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, x86, and then amd64.
NT the kernel is awesome. I just wish they'd shipped a better userspace from day one.
Imagine if Microsoft had shipped NT with a proper Unix-like shell environment in the 90s and not the crap "command.com" and WinCRT.dll garbage. What a better world we'd live in.
Yes the core initial engineers and leadership that started it were ex-DEC engineers.
But if you listen to Dave Cutler's interviews and read about it you can see clearly that some concepts were borrowed but much of the thinking was from scratch. He took the chance of starting a greenfield project to make something far more current.
In particular NT was designed from the ground up to be multiprocessor and multithreading friendly, which is not the case for VMS.
Secondly NT was designed to host multiple OS "personalities", VMS not at all.
Finally NT was designed to be portable between ISAs and they spent years making sure it worked equally well on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, x86, and then amd64.
NT the kernel is awesome. I just wish they'd shipped a better userspace from day one.
Imagine if Microsoft had shipped NT with a proper Unix-like shell environment in the 90s and not the crap "command.com" and WinCRT.dll garbage. What a better world we'd live in.