<QUOTE> NT's background is OpenVMS. </QUOTE> <QUOTE> NT 3.1 and 3.5 was based on OS/2. </QUOTE>
Each of the above is PARTIALLY correct. To properly attribute Windows, we need a bit of history. To those who are not interested, sorry for the rambling off-topic post. Please just hit delete. Today's Windows OS was originally called Windows NT. Windows NT was, in large part, designed by Dave Cutler. Cutler was the author of the PDP-11 operating system RSX-11M for Digital Equipment Corporation. He went on (with Dick Hustefedt) to design and implement VMS. After VMS, Cutler worked on a number of projects (including another OS called VaxELN, a PL1 compiler, and several others), eventually founding DEC West and heading development of the Mica OS which was to run on DEC's new Prism processor architecture. When Prism and Mica were canceled, Cutler left DEC West to join Microsoft, where they began working on writing an entirely new (replacement) for OS/2. This was back when Microsoft and IBM were partners. The idea was to create an operating system that would run well on RISC processors (which were all the rage at the time), and was not dependent on any specific processor architecture. The new operating system was named "NT OS/2" (the "NT" part, relates to the code name of original processor for which the OS was targeted, and only later was retrofitted with the meaning "New Technology" when the processor part of the project was dropped). After Microsoft and IBM had their major falling out (fueled, in no small part, by the decisions taken about NTOS2 interfaces), the "OS/2" part of the OS name was dropped, and the OS was referred to simply as NT. The first version of Windows NT was V3.1 (reflecting the huge success and popularity of Windows V3.1) was released in 1993. This operating system evolved into the Windows OS we have today. In today's Windows OS architecture, you can see echos of both VMS and RSX-11M. While the "inspiration" for NT was OS/2, I am not aware of any part of OS/2 that was incorporated in the NT project (except for one of the OS/2 developers, that is). de Peter K1PGV
