A bit of nuance to part of the story: IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the la

A bit of nuance to part of the story: IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy for a long while (one reason Compaq was the first to come out a 386), and demanded OS/2 run on it. Unfortunately, the 286 was seriously crippled for doing this sort of thing, as I recall, switching segment registers was very expensive. And for those of you who didn't live through the ugliness of 8086->286 (and 386 and beyond compatibility modes) programming, these were thoroughly 16 bit computers, where you had at most 64 KiB segments each of stack, code and data, unless you switched one of those segment registers to point elsewhere. That was cheap enough for the vast gain in memory on the 8086/8, and the 286 in its compatibility mode, but native? That mode did a lot more for you (like, hey, memory protection!), and Intel when that decision was made and implemented slowly simply didn't understand how people used their CPUs. Anyway, Windows 3.0 and on was taking off, no one but stupidly managed Lotus wanted to program OS/2 Presentation Manager, and prior to in 1988 that DEC killed off a RISC CPU + new operating system effort in favor of continuing with VAX/VMS for a while longer. The software people, at least, were in Bellevue, WA, and many were hired to develop OS/2 3.0, which due to the above morphed into NT 3.1 (which really was around a 3.x Microsoft quality release :-).