Here are some interesting articles about the history of Linux (Who wrote Linux) and Windows NT (Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story). Interestingly VMS which NT is based upon is renowned for being incredibly stable! There are several clusters that have for uptimes of over 10 years!

This is quite impressive the rootkit hooks into the mbr so it starts before any security tools, stores data in sectors instead of files and many other clever tricks. This makes it _really_ difficult to detect. MBR Rootkit, A New Breed of Malware