I'm pretty sure that in 2018, there won't be a “Windows Showcase” giving such a rush of sweet nostalgia; I wonder how come Win has so much more longevity than MS-DOS had?
Heck, even as late as Windows ME you had some kind of DOS sitting at the bottom. Only with Windows XP did consumer Windows fully evict the DOS underpinnings.
I think my first PC came with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.11. Barely touched Windows back then.
More info:
However the same people did design both Mica and NT. Namely Dave Cutler and his team of ex DEC engineers who got fired when the DEC PRISM project was closed (of which Mica was a core part).
By the logic of your argument Linux wasn't started in 1991, it was started in 1969 and called Unix originally... Even if both where independently developed.
Part of the arrangement was that MS would issue NT for the Alpha architecture, which in fact they did.
> … starting in 1986, at DEC, when it was called MICA.
Which isn't accurate. NT definitely contains ideas and maybe protected trade secrets from DEC, that's just inevitable when you hire all of DEC's former team to build your new OS. But it is a massive leap to then go on to claim that NT was in fact Mica or that NT was started years earlier because that is when Mica was.
See my Linux example. If you think that NT is Mica then Linux is Unix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
which I read some years ago. A fantastic story. Pinball is mentioned in it. Anyone interested, don't go by the description in the Wikipedia article; it may be only partially accurate, and anyway cannot do justice to the book. Try to get hold of an online or offline copy and read it. I'm not endorsing (or otherwise) any of the practices or principles described in the book - just found it a fascinating story. According to Wikipedia:
"The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[1] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction."
Current and former startupistas may be reminded by the book, of some aspects of their life/work-styles, whether good or bad.