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"Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2 API as its p

"Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2 API as its primary interface." Right... There's another reason why it was originally called OS/2 NT: IBM had hired Microsoft to co-develop OS/2 with them before Windows NT development had begun (as early as 1985). The reason for a resemblence to OS/2 with the name and API compatibility would seem to be so that Microsoft could develop the NT product as "OS/2" which could be charged back to IBM. So, effectively, IBM was unknowingly paying for a chunk of NT development. By the time IBM realized they were getting worked over it was too late, they had already been taken for a ride by Microsoft. They lost in two ways: they lost the the desktop market to Windows which shipped pre-installed on nearly all consumer PC's, and paying for dev work on OS/2 1.3 which really was going into NT product). So IBM took OS/2 development back in-house in 1990 and licked their wounds, but it was too late by then. Except for the embedded market, OS/2 had lost.

yuhong 8y ago
The OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of my favorite topics, BTW.
pjmlp 8y ago
Well, it helped that a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2. It has been several years, but I think the story is described here "Unauthorized Windows 95", I no longer have the book. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows-95/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows...
- yuhong 8y ago
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=98745 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=... One of the problems with running 16-bit programs directly in Win9x was the Win16Mutex, BTW.
  - mschaef 8y ago
    To some extent, _every_ Windows program on Win95 was a 16-bit program. (There was a lot of the 32-bit API that was built by thunking down to 16- bit equivalents.... one notable example was that Windows95 notepad was still limited to 32K files, etc.)
- mschaef 8y ago
  > a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2. That's sort of right. Larry Osterman goes into more detail here, but the gist is that Microsoft figured out how to run (mostly) unchanged Win16 apps in protected mode. This was released to market in 1990 and immediately turned into the best solution to get at more than 640K RAM.... which had been a latent and mostly unresolved issue for over five years. (So lots of pent-up demand.) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/02/farewell-to-one-of-the-great-ones/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/02/fa... (V86 Virtualization happened with Windows/386... another good product, but not nearly as compelling as Windows 3.0 was.)
indigodaddy 8y ago
Wouldn't that have been against contract/illegal (or whatever terminology) ?
- mschaef 8y ago
  At least on the IBM side, they were careful about IP rights. Summer of 1995, I had an internship (as a tester) on IBM's OS/2 LAN Server Enterprise team in Austin. This was well after the IBM/Microsoft 'divorce', but IBM's LAN Server product still had large volumes of code written by Microsoft and still displayed a Microsoft copyright message alongside the IBM copyright. At that time, one of several other initiatives at IBM was a longer term project to remove all the Microsoft code from LAN Server. To accomplish this, they divided their developers into 'Clean' and 'Dirty' groups, where cleanliness was defined as not having ever seen the Microsoft code. It was then only the 'Clean' developers that could contribute new replacement code. (The 'Enterprise' project was also interesting in and of itself. To help make the product more scalable, IBM was replacing all of the default directory/etc. services with a new version of DCE they were also developing for OS/2. 22 years later, it all seems pretty archaic, but it was fun at the time to be a bit involved.)

yuhong 8y ago

The OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of my favorite topics, BTW.

pjmlp 8y ago

Well, it helped that a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2. It has been several years, but I think the story is described here "Unauthorized Windows 95", I no longer have the book. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows-95/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows...

yuhong 8y ago
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=98745 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=... One of the problems with running 16-bit programs directly in Win9x was the Win16Mutex, BTW.
- mschaef 8y ago
  To some extent, _every_ Windows program on Win95 was a 16-bit program. (There was a lot of the 32-bit API that was built by thunking down to 16- bit equivalents.... one notable example was that Windows95 notepad was still limited to 32K files, etc.)
mschaef 8y ago
> a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2. That's sort of right. Larry Osterman goes into more detail here, but the gist is that Microsoft figured out how to run (mostly) unchanged Win16 apps in protected mode. This was released to market in 1990 and immediately turned into the best solution to get at more than 640K RAM.... which had been a latent and mostly unresolved issue for over five years. (So lots of pent-up demand.) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/02/farewell-to-one-of-the-great-ones/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/02/fa... (V86 Virtualization happened with Windows/386... another good product, but not nearly as compelling as Windows 3.0 was.)

indigodaddy 8y ago

Wouldn't that have been against contract/illegal (or whatever terminology) ?

mschaef 8y ago
At least on the IBM side, they were careful about IP rights. Summer of 1995, I had an internship (as a tester) on IBM's OS/2 LAN Server Enterprise team in Austin. This was well after the IBM/Microsoft 'divorce', but IBM's LAN Server product still had large volumes of code written by Microsoft and still displayed a Microsoft copyright message alongside the IBM copyright. At that time, one of several other initiatives at IBM was a longer term project to remove all the Microsoft code from LAN Server. To accomplish this, they divided their developers into 'Clean' and 'Dirty' groups, where cleanliness was defined as not having ever seen the Microsoft code. It was then only the 'Clean' developers that could contribute new replacement code. (The 'Enterprise' project was also interesting in and of itself. To help make the product more scalable, IBM was replacing all of the default directory/etc. services with a new version of DCE they were also developing for OS/2. 22 years later, it all seems pretty archaic, but it was fun at the time to be a bit involved.)