Re: Operating Systems (was: Re: Compiling AFLEX 1.4a with Dec Ada 83 3.5-20 on Open VMS 7.1)

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:

> My understanding of the situation is this: (Someone please stop me before I
> go off inventing history again!!! :-) Micro$oft wanted to discontinue the
> MS-DOS based OS's in favor of a next-generation product that would be a
> *real* OS, complete with virtual memory, real security, networking built in,
> etc.

Yes, this operating system was known as OS/2.  Microsoft planned to
support more architectures (MIPS, later on Alpha), a new architecture
(some sort of microkernel), ACLs in the file system, and so on for
OS/2 3.0.  After Microsoft broke with IBM and the tremendous success
of the Windows 3.x line and the hard stand of OS/2, the OS/2 3.0
project was continued as Windows NT.  (IBM's subsequent OS/2 releases
were all based on OS/2 2.0 technology, despite of the version number.)

> Well, someone on the Win9X project intercoursed-up and let the WNT (subtract
> one letter from each position - coincidence? I think not!) team finish up
> before they did.

Windows NT 3.1 is much older than most new-written parts of the
consumer Windows line, IIRC.  At the time Windows NT 3.1 was released,
you couldn't run it on ordinary machines, and it was just out of
question to base a consumer Windows on the NT code or architecture,
which naturally had extremly poor DOS compatibility and some Win16
programs didn't work either.  I'm not at all convinced that Microsoft
was happy with this situation, and it tried to unify the Windows
platforms over and over again.