Mark Russinovich is the kingpin of Windows troubleshooting. He sold a company called SysInternals to Microsoft in 2006. In a 1998 article in Windows Magazine, Mark talked about the history of NT and its intellectual origins in the progamming backwaters of DEC. In the article he describes the background of David Cutler, Chief Architect of NT, and part of the original VMS development team. He made a transition from writing application software at DuPont to writing operating systems at DEC. Digital announced VMS in 1977. Cutler was restless by 1981 and threatened to leave Digital. In response Digital gave Cutler 200 hardware and software engineers - Cutler moved to Seattle (Home of Starbucks) and started a dev-center out there in Washington State. Their mandate was to develop a new CPU architecture and OS for the 1990s. In 1988, Cutler's project was cancelled and MS execs leaped in to grab Cutler, along with 20 engineers from DEC. The result was Windows NT. It took over 200 developers and testers to bring it into fruition. With NT came the awesome new Win32 API, the 32-bit evolution of the 16-bit API of Windows 3.0.
Usenet joke: If you increment each letter in VMS you get WNT.
Usenet joke: If you increment each letter in VMS you get WNT.
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