
Shining some light on the history of OS/2, Win9x and NT - stargrave
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/67492.html
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temac
Mostly wrong IMO. NT is more like VMS rewritten + pieces of MS code integrated
(or rewritten), certainly not a "portable OS/2". The OS/2 parts were confined
in the subsystem and are now extinct. As for the IBM did not know how to do
OSes opinion, that's both kind of a joke and meaningless: in gigantic
organizations, there is not a single mind and single centralized knowledge
about X or Y. It bowl down to smaller teams, or even sub-teams. And if there
were, "IBM" has done plenty of OSes, and some of them have been in service and
backward compat for way longer than anything MS did, ever.

~~~
acqq
NT is a new design by the people who were involved in VMS. Even when they
didn't replicate everything, they had already acquired "taste" and
"experience" so some solutions of some problems are very similar, to the point
that knowing some detail in one OS gives you a good knowledge about the basics
of the detail in another. But this is only in some aspects. There are a lot of
important solutions that were made for the first time only in the NT.

The team developing NT had the requirements to fulfill that were never put in
front of them, and their result was at the end something in many aspects
fundamentally better than any competition. There are of course some aspects
that the competition did better too, but that was not enough to win the
market.

Whoever really wants to learn more about how it was made, including a lot of
details about the humans involved, should read the very good written book

"Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next
Generation at Microsoft" (1994) by G. Pascal Zachary

~~~
rplst8
> Whoever really wants to learn more about how it was made, including a lot of
> details about the humans involved, should read the very good written book
> "Show Stopper!...

I can't recommend this book enough. It's a very interesting story and gave me
an appreciation for what it takes to do big things in the software industry.

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jsjohnst
Not only did I live through this era of operating systems, I’m also a
voracious reader of the history of tech companies and have read dozens of
books on Microsoft and IBM history, and yet never once have I heard many of
the claims in this article. I’d take it with a grain of salt if it were me.

~~~
jchw
I found the claim that OS/2’s difficulty to run in a VM lead to Virtualbox
pretty fascinating. I can’t find any direct sources for this claim at a
cursory glance but it does seem that Virtualbox supported OS/2 quite early on.
Interestingly, it seems that Virtualbox began life in 2007, which makes it
confusing if true; why were people so interested in virtualizing OS/2 in 2007?

~~~
Tsiklon
I recall seeing ATMs running OS/2 until quite recently.

I could imagine that the hardware running that software was getting quite long
in the tooth, and that a virtualised platform would be a potential stop gap
measure in extending the service life of that investment.

Now I see a good number of embedded windows ATMs (that tell tale click sound
is always a dead give away). I assume that the majority of the OS/2 ATM Fleet
is long since gone.

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trentnelson
> DEC cancelled it. Cutler and his team left and went to Microsoft. MS didn't
> know what to do with this élite group so it gave them OS/2 3 to finish.

Based on the Showstoppers book -- it's more like: Bill Gates knew the days of
Windows 3.x were limited, and needed a new, next generation operating system.

Gordon Bell convinced Bill Gates to call David Cutler, of VMS/DEC fame (Bill
Gates was always impressed with DEC as an engineering company).

Cutler was like, "what, come work for that dinky company that makes crappy
Office docs and a shitty OS? Psscht."

Bill persisted, saying it'll be a brand new OS that he'll lead. Cutler
insisted only if he got to bring his DEC team (like, 200+ people) and
basically got whatever he wanted. Bill obliged.

NT development started in '89.

Such a pivotal moment in computing history. If I ever got to chat to Bill
Gates, I'd ask him what he was more proud of: a) getting Cutler on board for
NT, or b) orchestrating the backward-compat mindset that set up the Windows
3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Windows NT -> Windows XP transition.

~~~
zantana
I would say Windows 3.1 -> Windows NT + Windows 95/98 -> Windows 2000.

The transformation from the sausage factory of the indestructible, but
inflexible, NT and the fragile set of hacks which was 95 into 2000 environment
was the real story in all this.

This combined with to migrating from Netbios and NT Domains to tcp/ip and
active directory was really the basis for everything they've done in the 21st
century. They did more in those 6 years than they've done in the 20 years
since.

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codingdave
It is hard to pull an accurate history from a couple decades ago. All I know
is that when I worked at IBM in those days, a few coders told me that OS/2 was
supposed to be an OS for mainframe controllers, but that it got usurped by
people with other ideas, and was just another project that wasn't going to fly
very far.

I didn't know whether that was true, why they said it, or what really was
going on with the people involved. But I remember the comment and always take
what I hear about the history of projects with a grain of salt.

------
karmakaze
There's some misstatements in there. "IBM developed OS/2 2 on its own" is
definitely not true. I was working with OS/2 1.x and receiving frequent drops
of early development versions of OS/2 2.x all clearly from Microsoft on
floppies with Microsoft OS/2 2.0 all over them. I even went to MS's Redmond
campus for several weeks of OS/2 API programming. What is true is that MS was
tasked with the OS/2 3.x effort while IBM carried on with the OS/2 2.x line.

At the time, the Windows 9x vs OS/2 2.x didn't have a clear expected winner.
In the end the doom of OS/2 was due a lack of applications. There were other
contributing factors like how IBM simultaneously launched the PS/2 line and
the OS/2 1.x version were rarely run on non-IBM hardware (v1.3 ran like a
dream on PC clones though.)

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karmakaze
The WinOS2 development was an incredible marketing and technical marvel.
Codenamed Ferengi and sold as "OS/2 for Windows" it allowed you to 'upgrade'
your Windows-license installation to run OS/2 with Windows 3.1 running on top
of OS/2\. It would be like installing Linux on a Windows machine and getting
Linux and Wine. Before it was done, most everyone was saying that it wasn't
possible. It ran most of the native windows drivers the main thing that was
tricky was sharing the screen to have seamless Windows rectangles overlapping
with OS/2 rectangles.

I personally didn't care for running cooperatively scheduled Windows 16-bit
apps on a 32-bit OS.

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GeekyBear
Mark Russinovich, the current CTO of Azure at Microsoft, wrote an article
years ago pointing out that Windows NT was more than "influenced" by VMS and
at the deepest levels it was closer to a rewrite of VMS from VAX assembly
language into C.

Components evolved during the rewrite and, of course, there were many new
things added, (Win32, NTFS, etc) but the base is the same.

[https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-
vm...](https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-
story)

~~~
jonjacky
VMS was mostly written in Bliss, a high-level language, not VAX assembler.
When you bought a VAX, it came with a box of microfiche cards showing the VMS
source code.

