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

[Greg Brown]

Digital UNIX (vs. analog UNIX I suppose) on the Alpha chip was a 
wonderful thing.

Dave Cutler is one of the 14 Distinguished Engineers at Microsoft.  He 
worked for DEC and he contributed to VMS in many, many ways.  In a lot 
of ways the multi-threading engine of NT has the same flaws as VMS 
because of his cross-pollination (or so the theory goes).

The M$ 14
http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/exec/de/default.asp

A REAL Distinguished Engineer, IMHO
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/

Greg

On Jan 1, 2005, at 11:30 PM, Kevin Flanagan wrote:

> Dan,
>
>     I used to work at DEC, from 88 to 94, and heard a lot of other
> things, don't know how many are true.
>
>
> Cutler's project was supposedly called Prism, when the Alpha Chip came
> out it was called AXP, officially it "didn't stand for anything", but
> rumor said that meant Almost eXactly Prism.
>
> I still have some mugs, and shirts from those days, until recently I 
> had
> an Alpha workstation, Magnus has it now.
>
>
>
>
> Kevin
>
> On Sat, 2005-01-01 at 21:12 -0500, Dan Monjar wrote:
>
>> 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 ;-)
>
> -- 
> Kevin Flanagan <kevin at flanagannc.net>
> -- 
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