4 ms·

Nt is not a evolution of dos. A similar issue you need a new kernel for protected memory etc. Apple did make attempts see Taligent

• hedgehog 5y ago
  Exactly. MS rehosted win16 apps on top of a new kernel, ported the UI, and encouraged developers to migrate code to win32. Apple had pieces of a similar transition with the transition to PPC but failed to execute, maybe because they were betting on different attempts to rewrite everything from scratch.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    Win16 and NT branch don't share almost anything. Probably the only port was Win32s, which was a subset of Win32 backported to Win16. Win16 stuff runned on a VM like environment, WOW. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows
    • hedgehog 5y ago
      I'll admit I haven't seen the NT source but from a user perspective NT's UI (widgets, progman, etc) looked and functioned near identically to Windows 3 so I've always thought those bits were ported over. I'm aware most everything under that was replaced. To my eye that was one step in a well-executed evolution up from legacy Windows towards the eventual convergence in XP.
      • temac 5y ago
        Yes the GUI was mostly ported from consumer Windows to NT. First the 3.1 GUI, then 95.