NT was in fact all new code written from the ground up - there is no code from VMS (or the later MICA project at DEC which more closely resembled NT than VMS). Any serious study of VMS' architecture will show that there are considerable differences between NT and VMS.
While Microsoft may have been "dragged kicking and screaming" to the specific $105 million figure mentioned in this article, a co-marketing arrangement that resulted in DEC endorsing Windows NT as a migration path for its significant but declining install base of UNIX and VMS server and workstation customers sounds like a win for Microsoft, not DEC.
It also reminds me of the settlement of the DEC v. Intel lawsuit the next year that resulted in Intel buying out DEC's semiconductor operations and DEC endorsing IA-64.
If nothing else, the DEC/Microsoft alliance eventually resulted in a promotional copy of OpenVMS and Windows NT Integration for Dummies[1] showing up in my mailbox, which as I recall was both amusing (the book's name) and informative (its contents) at the time.
Both can be true. The design is clearly VMS influenced, but that doesn’t mean they took code from VMS, which DEC clearly would have had a say about. I think Mark’s point in the slide is to emphasize they didn’t take code from older versions of Windows.
There are similarities commensurate with the fact that Cutler and other former DEC engineers designed NT. Overall, they are quite different operating systems. The idea that NT is some kind of rewrite of VMS is seriously overstated.
