Windows NT was supposed to be a modernized VMS (And legend has VMS+1=WNT, each letter individually…) - and given a face similar to Win 3.1 (and then 95/98/Me and then they were unified in XP)
It has a lot of the VMS features, and most of them are unused or effectively only used by malware (e.g. alternate file streams).
I did not get a chance to use VMS myself, but I did use Unix (and VMS/CMS, and a bunch of other OSes) at a time VAX was still a viable alternative even for greenfield projects.
My impression is that it is sort of like J/K/APL - powerful, compact, coherent, got almost everything right from a technical standpoint - but not friendly, feels foreign, and not liked by anyone who has ever used a Unix, or Windows, or a Mac - which is 99% of the relevant population since about 1985.
(Added): Macs also had multiple file streams (“forks”). It doesn’t anymore, for many reasons, but the chief one is interoperability. Less is more, worse is better.
Which goes to show why *nix won over more feature rich alternatives - the human element. Being feature rich makes the learning curve (usually) much steeper but tends to help in the long-term, while shifting the complexity in to userland means that if I don't need a feature, it needn't concern me.
You trade ability for reduction of complexity - getting an operating system that you can learn in months instead of years, which - since the tech industry has been in hipper-growth phase for much of the last 30 years, was more important.
Indeed, had AT&T been able to sell UNIX at VMS prices (or whatever else OS from those days) from day one, without access to source code, and history would have taken a different path, regarding UNIX and C adoption.
Given Cutler hated UN*X, that only makes sense. NT did a lot of things right at the kernel level.
> and most of them are unused or effectively only used by malware (e.g. alternate file streams).
"Most of them unused"?
ADS was added to NTFS to support Mac OS file sharing over AFP ("Services for Macintosh"). Microsoft makes use of it for downloads from Edge, among other things. It's otherwise not a supremely useful feature and one that you'll silently lose data when moving to another fs/www further degrading it's usefulness.
Re file streams yes classic macOS did have them current macOS does not but it does not need them as you can use Bundles instead which are Unix directories that are treated as a whole by the SDKs.
It has a lot of the VMS features, and most of them are unused or effectively only used by malware (e.g. alternate file streams).
I did not get a chance to use VMS myself, but I did use Unix (and VMS/CMS, and a bunch of other OSes) at a time VAX was still a viable alternative even for greenfield projects.
My impression is that it is sort of like J/K/APL - powerful, compact, coherent, got almost everything right from a technical standpoint - but not friendly, feels foreign, and not liked by anyone who has ever used a Unix, or Windows, or a Mac - which is 99% of the relevant population since about 1985.
(Added): Macs also had multiple file streams (“forks”). It doesn’t anymore, for many reasons, but the chief one is interoperability. Less is more, worse is better.