Furthermore, #VMS pioneered advanced fault-tolerant, distributed computing with VAXcluster technology, which allowed multiple systems to share a single file system and management domain, establishing VMS as a leader in high-availability enterprise computing. These innovations influenced later designs, including Cutler’s subsequent work on #Microsoft #WindowsNT.
Via @unix_byte
alcinnz
boosted
@DarvenDissek @sebsauvage The fun part is that #QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System" and was a one-person project by somebody who built a CP/M alternative by himself.
#Microsoft bought it for small money, relabeled it as #MSDOS and made their first Millions with it.
Furthermore: #Windows was a rip-off from macOS. And #WindowsNT was a dirty hit in the back while MS was (co-)developing #OS2 for IBM.
Most people don't even know about #Excel and (partly) #Word being a 3rd-party software bought by MS.
The main contribution by MS was not as a software developing company. Their core competence was taking money for something that was for free and widely shared and improved by all sorts of people before. They invented proprietary software, software licenses and mandatory software bundles with hardware with no option not to pay for it.
Whatever software decisions were made on top, were mostly really poor decisions IMO.
@DarvenDissek @sebsauvage The fun part is that #QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System" and was a one-person project by somebody who built a CP/M alternative by himself.
#Microsoft bought it for small money, relabeled it as #MSDOS and made their first Millions with it.
Furthermore: #Windows was a rip-off from macOS. And #WindowsNT was a dirty hit in the back while MS was (co-)developing #OS2 for IBM.
Most people don't even know about #Excel and (partly) #Word being a 3rd-party software bought by MS.
The main contribution by MS was not as a software developing company. Their core competence was taking money for something that was for free and widely shared and improved by all sorts of people before. They invented proprietary software, software licenses and mandatory software bundles with hardware with no option not to pay for it.
Whatever software decisions were made on top, were mostly really poor decisions IMO.
Did you know that the 'NT' in Windows NT stood for "Nine Ten"?
The intended core platform for the OS was the then-expected Intel i910 RISC processor, which was to be the rebranded moniker for the i860 that can be found in the wild.
It never came to be due to the i860s terrible handling of context switching -- a capability that a CPU for a multitasking, multiuser workstation OS must be able to do very_efficiently. The i860 wasn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTkFGZqVCM8&t=459s
** EDIT: Several have pointed to sources indicating differently that NT stood for N10, which was the codename for the i860, so -- N10, N-Ten > NT.
#TIL#WindowsNT#Windows#Intel #i860 #i910 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing#OS#techhistory#RISC #x86 #processors #computers #computinghistory#Microsoft