Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard

One reason for reading this concisely informative article, in case you're wondering why you should care:

The architect of RSX-11M and VMS was Dave Cutler, who planned a portable, object-oriented successor, PRISM. When DEC wasn't interested, he and some of his team decamped to Microsoft, where they were given the project of reviving the moribund OS/2 3 project after the IBM-Microsoft split. While OS/2 2 was the Intel 386 version, OS/2 3 was to be portable to non-x86 processors. Both PRISM and OS/2 3 fed into the new OS Cutler built for the Intel i860 CPU, a RISC/VLIW chip Intel had hoped might be a successor to the x86 line.

There were two versions of the chip – the basic i860XR, codenamed the N10, and the enhanced i86XP, codenamed N11. Microsoft built its own i860 workstations for the development effort, based around the i860XTR and consequently nick-named the "N-Ten". The initials of these – NT – is where the eventual name for Cutler's finished OS: Windows NT.