[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally Posted by Avian

Happy birthday VAX!

In a bedroom in a house on Lake Washington in Seattle, a scruffied hair geeky man just woke up sweating. He turns to his wife, "Honey, I just had a terrible dream. Someone was trying to kill me! Honey?" Suddenly, he notices a long haired man at the end of the bed, standing with his arms crossed. "A dream to some... A nightmare to others!" The man vanishes into thin air. THe man in the bed notices there's something on the wall where the bearded man was. Is it some sort of logo? It looks somehow familiar. He squints, finally putting on his glasses. "No, it can't be! It CAN'T BE! NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

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Strangely enough David Cutler, the progenitor of several OSs during his tenure at d|i|g|i|t|a|l Equipment Corp. (RT-11, RSTS-e, RSX-11 and VMS), went to work for Micro$oft in the late 1980s. There's a book entitled: Inside Windows NT which describes much of the kernel of NT. It looks VERY much like VMS save for the lack of ASTs; the corresponding enitity in NT (called the APC) is handled more like the Ada language concept of Accept/Rendezvous -- meaning the OS is asynchronous if you're looking for asynchronisms. The scheduling is event driven like VMS, the scheduling entity is the thread like VMS, I/O subsystem and drivers are very similar to VMS (save for ASTs), memory management concepts are similar to VMS. DCL (digital command language) is often times refered to as David Cutler's Language. Here's a link to the DCL dictionary documentation wherein you can see yours truly prominently mentioned by name in example #4.

Seeing as how David Cutler got it right once, I'd doubt he'd have designed the NT innards any differently. The real problem is the garbage that Micro$oft layers atop the kernel. Billzebub also held great disdain for the logical name table scheme in VMS and Micro$oft's Miscreant Idiot Coding Rejects Outputting Specious Often Flawed Technology (notice that spells Micro$oft) devised the brain-damaged "registry" to supplant the logical name table and heirarchical name space.