> 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 rig

> 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.)