Hacker News Reader

Reading your comments, I suddenly realized that Win NT comes from PRISM which come from VMS so it also derived from minicomputer era. Interesting, never thought about that.

I think MS-DOS comes from CP/M which was also sort of rooted in the minicomputer era.

View on HN

Dave Cutler, the head of the NT project came from DEC where he did VMS. Big lawsuit when MS hired him.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Yeah that's what I read in Showstoppers too.

WNT = V + 1, M + 1, S + 1

"Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860 (code-named 'N-Ten)', a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"

-- Mark Lucovsky

Distinguished Engineer, Windows Server Architect

https://web.archive.org/web/20110720042038/http://www.winsup...

So NT from VMS is not true as pointed out above. However a funning one that is suppose to be true is from the 2001 Space Odyssey series. The name of the insane AI was H.A.L.

H>I

A>B

L>M

I found surprising that IBM's CMS had commands like "DIR" and "TYPE".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com