Whatever happened to that? I've read the articles from the time how the NT kernel was designed to have Win32, POSIX and OS/2 as equal ways to talk to the kernel, via the subsystem architecture. And if you dig deep enough in modern Windows you find things that were probably invented for that (like support for case-sensitive names in NTFS), but the feature seems to have vanished as soon as it launched, only to be resurrected two decades later as WSL1.
I can just imagine Microsoft-internal politics went against the idea?
Eventually it got replaced by Interix, which was further replaced by SUA until Windows 8.
Naturally nowadays Linux syscalls compatibility relevance grew to the point that even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers, so WSL made more sense than plain POSIX.
I can just imagine Microsoft-internal politics went against the idea?