Although true far as I know, people new to topic might misread that as it being a derivative OS/2 they ran with against IBM. It was a enhanced clone of OpenVMS by the OpenVMS team they poached per Russinovich:
They kept better architecture that could eventually be turned into a solid server. For time to market, they ditched the quality, high-availability, etc. They added a GUI. Backward compatible with DOS apps plus compatible with OS/2 stuff if I remember right. Tada! Eventually, added quality and security back in with SDL plus clustering. Bill had already achieved dominance at that point with OS/2 and every other desktop being an also ran.
Far as OS/2 goes, I read the original versions of NT were developed on OS/2 workstations that the developers gave up grudgingly when forced to dogfood on NT. They also used UNIXen for some server stuff and ran the business on a AS/400. They seemed to have just used whatever was best at each thing with long-term plan to replace it all with their competing product copying one, improving over others, and integrating some (i.e. open-source).
The core NT design with its kernel personalities is what allowed them to things like adding linux support, but in the book they describe there was so much pushback because it pushed ram requirements up to 8 mb (outside the abilities of consumer pc’s at the time) that Gates himself had to intervene several times to keep Cutler’s architecture intact.
I also really loved the bits about Cutler’s personality. They came across as more myth than fact but you do get the sense that working for him must have been a singular experience.
I ran it on a MIPS Magnum R4000 for a while. I forget the name of the compatibility feature, but you could run 16-bit x86 Windows apps (may have been 32bit, it's been 20 years) with only a slight performance hit.
Oh there was, just people with big pockets. Have some application written in VB6? Need it to go faster where money is no object? Get VB for the Dec Alpha. Although I've never seen anyone do that, but there was such a thing.
Now when it came to a massive DEC Alpha to run SQL Server, then absolutely. It was the ultimate hardware solution to a software scalability problem, and it was not cheap.
The happening of free UNIX clones also helped, as the companies that might have transitioned to such Windows systems, rather migrated to BSD and Linux distributions instead.
Yes. Its predecessor is still a port in progress to x86 instead of running on it due to its less portable design. That was a real improvement by NT team.
> It was a enhanced clone of OpenVMS by the OpenVMS team they poached per Russinovich
I think the word "clone" is too strong. DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS because it attempts to implement the same APIs, with the objective that most (ideally all) software written for MS-DOS would run on DR-DOS without modification. By contrast, Windows NT doesn't implement any of the APIs of VMS, and VMS software cannot run on Windows NT without modification. Microsoft did take people and high-level ideas from VMS, but they were never trying to build a clone of OpenVMS-which would require aligning API details (as opposed to just high-level concepts)
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...
They kept better architecture that could eventually be turned into a solid server. For time to market, they ditched the quality, high-availability, etc. They added a GUI. Backward compatible with DOS apps plus compatible with OS/2 stuff if I remember right. Tada! Eventually, added quality and security back in with SDL plus clustering. Bill had already achieved dominance at that point with OS/2 and every other desktop being an also ran.
Far as OS/2 goes, I read the original versions of NT were developed on OS/2 workstations that the developers gave up grudgingly when forced to dogfood on NT. They also used UNIXen for some server stuff and ran the business on a AS/400. They seemed to have just used whatever was best at each thing with long-term plan to replace it all with their competing product copying one, improving over others, and integrating some (i.e. open-source).