To be fair, resource forks have been around since HFS first came out. I doubt Apple invented this concept, but they definitely predate MS on this front.
Dave Cutler's team writing NT came from VMS which has multi-version files which are pretty much the same as multi-fork files.
Not the same thing at all. On VMS, when you opened a file, made changes and saved them, you automatically got a new version. You could open any version using the colon syntax, but it's not the same thing at all as resource forks.