But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i (or IBM mainframes, which are however themselves very, very different from IBM i), or Windows is closer to UNIX than VMS. Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.
> But then either VMS is much closer to UNIX than to things like IBM i
I'm not really sure that is the case at all. VMS had versioning file system that had support for multiple file types including stream, sequential, indexed and relative. It had a very different security model, four levels of processor access (unix there's kernel and userland) and it had very different networking capabilities, including clustering baked in (in 1983).
> Because Windows is very close to UNIX compared to either of those.
There's deep VMS heritage in Windows NT: both VMS and NT were written by David Cutler.
Agreed. I've only limited experience with i, but more with z. After using them, the other OSes you might use start to look and feel pretty similar to each other.
You've got it backwards. Digital cancelled Cutler's pet project and he shopped himself, and Digital's IP, to Microsoft. VMS and NT have a lot of similarities, but NT is not VMS, though they have a common ancestor: MICA = NT
