Hacker News Reader

Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i (or IBM mainframes, which are however themselves very, very different from IBM i), or Windows is closer to UNIX than VMS. Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.

View on HN

> But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i

I'm not really sure that is the case at all. VMS had versioning file system that had support for multiple file types including stream, sequential, indexed and relative. It had a very different security model, four levels of processor access (unix there's kernel and userland) and it had very different networking capabilities, including clustering baked in (in 1983).

> Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.

There's deep VMS heritage in Windows NT: both VMS and NT were written by David Cutler.

I know! But then VMS is maybe closer than it seems? Have a look at IBM i.

Agreed. I've only limited experience with i, but more with z. After using them, the other OSes you might use start to look and feel pretty similar to each other.

Microsoft hired the main architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, away from DEC to design Windows NT. (VMS++ = WNT)

You've got it backwards. Digital cancelled Cutler's pet project and he shopped himself, and Digital's IP, to Microsoft. VMS and NT have a lot of similarities, but NT is not VMS, though they have a common ancestor: MICA = NT

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA

Windows has very stringent file locking; Unix doesn't.

I believe this major design difference came from VMS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com