alt Hacker NewsNever worked with VAX/VMS, however have spent enough time reading through its manuals.
Systems programming with compiled BASIC, its Extended Pascal version, the API surface that somehow we can find traces where Windows NT got its design inspiration from, really leaves some space for what ifs, in the operating systems adoption evolution.
The VMS influence is also why DOS and NT used / for options rather than - like Unix. I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands. It provided a nice standardized way of parsing command line arguments that was going to be consistent between all applications.