I remember the lawsuit threats back in the 90’s. Here’s an article from 1996:
“Last year, somone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently found whole chunks of Mica comment for comment, note for note still there in Windows NT.”
Right; Mica wasn’t VMS as far as I know, but rather a generic kernel that would have hosted VMS as a client API, a little like how NT hosts Win32 and POSIX (and not OS/2), or how IBM’s Workplace OS was going to host OS/2, AIX, and Mac OS as “personalities.” It’s not likely that any VMS-specific code would have been salvaged from Mica for use in NT, but rather the nucleus of a portable API-agnostic kernel, in which case any architectural resemblance to VMS has more to do with Cutler’s sensibilities and less to do with code re-use.
A minor correction:
I remember the lawsuit threats back in the 90’s. Here’s an article from 1996:
“Last year, somone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently found whole chunks of Mica comment for comment, note for note still there in Windows NT.”
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat
Right; Mica wasn’t VMS as far as I know, but rather a generic kernel that would have hosted VMS as a client API, a little like how NT hosts Win32 and POSIX (and not OS/2), or how IBM’s Workplace OS was going to host OS/2, AIX, and Mac OS as “personalities.” It’s not likely that any VMS-specific code would have been salvaged from Mica for use in NT, but rather the nucleus of a portable API-agnostic kernel, in which case any architectural resemblance to VMS has more to do with Cutler’s sensibilities and less to do with code re-use.