We still have a few VMS and VAXELN systems in the field, even Micro PDP11s (11/73), the latter running Micro Power Pascal, put into service more than 20 years ago and still performing. (I may have mentioned that before).
When Dave Cutler left DEC and started on the NT kernel I became curious, first time I looked at MS not as a toy company. It turned out we could port a good deal of the ELN stuff to NT without major problems (apart from replacing Pascal with C++), since both had the same multi-threading programming paradigm ("Wait for multiple objects") while Unix then without threads was just a pain in the ... Never seen anything more counter-intuitive than forking a process.
My suggestion since XP always has been to split Windows up again, into a consumer and a pro branch. But they wouldn't listen.
I appears you came from the developer side while I spent my time in the computer room running batch jobs and sorting reports.
I agree. There are users with different needs. The NT Kernel is still there in all subsequent versions of Windows including the desktop and server versions, however, they ruined the OS with stupid wizards! IT pros and developers don't need a nanny screen to share a folder; we just want to get the job done. There isn't one day that goes by without me opening up a command prompt so I can do something with a few keystrokes which is totally unintuitive with a wizard. With the current version of Server, MS has gone away from the big GUI interface and has given the admin nothing but a command prompt and a quick-and-easy interface. Most of the time, however, the majority of the work is done in the console with PowerShell scripts, which I recommend that you learn if you get a chance. It took how long to give a MS operating system a powerful batch and scripting language that only comes close now to VMS.
Way back in my MIS days, I ran an 11/73, 2 - 11/780s, and one VAX 8350. The 11/780s were rated at 1 MIP, or the equivalent to a 16MHz 80386. The VAXs were and still are great machines and VMS is a truly awesome operating system which I found confused me when I switched to MSDOS due to the similarity in commands. VMS was and is extremely intuitive, and even easier to use because of the extensive online help which has never been equaled even with man pages in the 'nix world.
John
Seems someone is always updating a perfectly working, user friendly OS, site, program ... making it more difficult to use.
Even Google Images has changed, making less images seen ... and you can no longer click: "Go to Webpage".
MS Weather is now powered by stupid "Bing" ... and allot of features were obliterated.
Why do they constantly have to keep changing things on us ?
I was perfectly happy with Vista, and Windows7, and knew exactly how to get to every place on my PC ... Stupid Windows8 colored tile screen ... Sheeesh !
Can't wait for Windows9 to come out
Windows 9 is now Windows 10. At the present time, W10 has given us back the start menu and the Windows 7-like interface which I used anyway even with Windows 8.1. In fact I put all my application short-cuts in a folder and never touched the stupid Start Menu under Windows 8.x except to play Solitaire and FreeCell.
John