[QSIITurbo]

Apple would've gone nowhere with their pricing with NeXT. NeXT station was basically a Silicon Graphics workstation for developers and cost 8000, about four times as much as a high-end gaming PC that would run Win31 Word and Excel with no problems. So not a computer for the masses. I see the pricing problem happening to OS X at the moment.

MS has excelled in getting price, (backwards) compatibility and system requirements correctly. That's why they moved slowly at the time and still do in some regards.

OS/2 was merged into Windows NT which is what almost everyone is using on desktop these day. IBM even tried giving OS/2 for free (Warp or 2.1, can't remember, you could get it by sending a coupon to the publisher), but the lack of compatibility and system requirements killed it. I remember booting it on a 486/33 + 8MB, yuck. Contrast that to almost instant startup of DOS and the requirements of an ordinary user.

Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user.

[chiph]

> OS/2 was merged into Windows NT

Sortof yes, sortof no. Microsoft's relationship with IBM was damaged by this point, and they had hired Dave Cutler to start work on NT in 1988 (the breakup happened in 1990). There were stories about Microsoft starting newly hired engineers on the OS/2 program to get them up to speed on 32-bit event-driven programming, then moving them to NT after IBM effectively paid for their training.

You needed an i486 DX2 with at least 8mb and 120mb drive to run OS/2 effectively. This was a high-spec machine back then - not cheap.

I still have my OS/2 Warp t-shirt somewhere in the back of the closet...

[ldiracdelta]

During my education at the University of Washington, one of the lecturers was on the Microsoft side of the OS/2 development. He said that the relationship drastically soured when some IBM supplied code got passed around with comments by Microsoft employees just mercilessly ripping the IBM code apart. And then it got back to IBM..

[52-6F-62]

"...for the home-user."

I think that says it all right there. In 1994 I was still very young, learning DOS on my mother's old 80286 she'd purchased for work in the mid 80's. I'd had some exposure to Win3.1, but Windows 95 was when I thought the future had arrived.

I was ignorant; but it was more highly polished (than Win3), just looked easier, and it had much greater market exposure because of the business world. It had a few stupid games, could still run most DOS applications (at my age, games), and a clean up of the skeuomorphism that had arrived in the other OS's at the time. Everybody knew what NOTEPAD.EXE did.

Sure you could say the same for Mac, NeXT, OS/2, and pretty much whatever GUI was popping its head up at the time, or eventually.... but my parents didn't know what a Mac was. They weren't cool. Or wealthy.

Queue: what's available for purchase for uncool people in rural Canada who still have technological wants.... and nothing.

Getting that price point down was key in pervading such a wide variety of demographics in the marketplace, and getting the home, unwitting user, hooked; for better or for worse.

[nickpsecurity]

Windows NT was a modified version of OpenVMS done by the OpenVMS team:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

I'm still looking for how much of OS/2 made it into NT. I know NT had an OS/2 subsystem which is an obvious candidate. What I did find is that Windows NT was developed on OS/2 computers. They also had to be forced to give up OS/2 & dogfood on Windows NT. They didn't want to lol.

[temac]

Cutler developed VMS, and then went to MS and developped NT. NT is not a modified version of VMS, although some principle are obvious common.

At the very beginning, NT was developed as NT OS/2, targeted for OS/2 v3.

Then MS and IBM parted ways, and NT was retargeted to Windows NT (with a Win32 API as the main userspace). Then initial plan was already to be able to support the OS/2 API and at least Win16, anyway, so the idea of classic NT subsystem could be leveraged and the retargeting was not too painful. Also, IIRC it happened relatively early in the development process.

At the very beginning, the initial team used OS/2 hosts, because obviously they had to have some dev hosts... But soon enough they self-hosted. The idea that they did not want to is far fetched. At most maybe they did not want to do that too early, which is understandable. NT was soon vastly superior to OS/2, so I can not imagine any reason for devs to want to stick to that legacy host...

[nickpsecurity]

"NT is not a modified version of VMS, although some principle are obvious common."

Russinovich claimed it is in the linked article with evidence they even have similar internals just renamed. He's the goto guy for information on Windows Internals. DEC claimed same thing in lawauit. So, what evidence do you have that Windows NT kernel wasn't a reimplementation of OpenVMS design with modifications?

[MarkKB]

You claimed that Windows NT was VMS with modifications. That's not what Russinovich claims - he claims that the internal design is very similar to VMS, and thus NT's design was most likely heavily inspired by VMS's. "Architectural and design influences" is the strongest claim Russinovich makes in the article as to the link between NT and VMS.

In a similar way, Microsoft Word no doubt has "architectural and design influences" with Bravo (thanks to Charles Simonyi), but it would be false to conclude that Word is "a modified version of Bravo".

[glhaynes]

Some interesting info on the OS/2 subsystem is here: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/....

My favorite part is how NT didn't directly use CONFIG.SYS — but, if you edited C:\CONFIG.SYS from an OS/2 editor, NT would render a "stub" CONFIG.SYS file from the OS/2-specific settings from the Registry; then, when the editor saved the file, it would translate those settings back into appropriate Registry keys!

Another interesting tidbit: Up through NT 4.0, Microsoft sold the "Windows NT Add-On Subsystem for Presentation Manager" that let 16-bit OS/2 GUI apps run on NT.

So much work went into the OS/2 subsystem, but I can't imagine it was important at all to NT's eventual marketplace success.

[Moto7451]

It wouldn't surprise me if that was done to satisfy some large entity's contractual requirements. Perhaps some part of the government that invested in OS/2.

[yuhong]

MS still had to sell OS/2 1.3 until NT was released.

[temac]

> So much work went into the OS/2 subsystem, but I can't imagine it was important at all to NT's eventual marketplace success.

It was even the reverse that is true. MS support of Win32 instead of OS/2 PM was a strategical choice, and the market and dev strategy was structured in concert. OS/2 did not had a good enough market share, compared to the Win API - hypothetically and then in practice. For Win16 it was not a concern because both could run that well (enough) - and OS/2 used a licensed Windows 3 copy to do that, but then came Win32. Given codevelopment between MS and IBM was not working well, MS used NT retargeted mainly to Win32 in part to kill a competitor, from after they parted ways, on that market.

The strategy has been successful.

[glhaynes]

To be clear, I was talking about early NT's OS/2 subsystem - not about the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 project in general, which I think you're talking about?

[temac]

Yes, I saw you were talking about the subsystem, but I think this is highly related to the whole picture. The OS/2 subsystem in released NT was neither a critical component, nor was it actually interesting for MS that it became too good. However, it was possible at all, for a lot of reasons, because NT was originally intended to be NT OS/2.

[JdeBP]

> I'm still looking for how much of OS/2 made it into NT.

Very little, and the code re-use was pretty much nil.

The OS/2 subsystem in Windows NT only implemented the 16-bit OS/2 API. It only implemented the base CP API, not implementing the 16-bit Presentation Manager API at all, and not even implementing all of that base API.

Moreover, Cutler re-implemented the things needed by that API from scratch. He quite famously railed against the OS/2 mutex abstraction, naming his re-implementation in Windows NT a "mutant".

[yuhong]

Early versions of NT supported HPFS, and NT of course still supports EA to this day.

[chungy]

NTFS itself is directly derived from HPFS.

[JdeBP]

No, it is not. NTFS, if one looks at it, is a direct descendant of Files-11, the on-disc filesystem layout for VMS. ODS has several of the elements of NTFS:

* a master file table (INDEXF.SYS => $MFT)

* ACLs, with a system of ACL-bypass privileges

* a whole bunch of special files, with known fixed entries in the MFT, including a block bitmap file and a bad block file (BITMAP.SYS => $Bitmap, BADBLK.SYS => $BadClus)

In contrast, there are significant dissimilarities with HPFS.

[nickpsecurity]

That corroborates my reference a bit where author says they made changes to filesystem during the clone of VMS. There would be similarities between the two filesystems if this were true.

[pjmlp]

> Also, IBM sold PS/2 (or something like that) with OS/2 preinstalled... It booted like forever and there was zero software available for the home-user.

And was like 500 € (on today's money) more expensive than a PC compatible with similar specs.

[brudgers]

The big thing the PS/2 had going at introduction was 80386 chips. The big limitation over the long term for consumers was MicroChannel which limited flexibility in configuring systems due to fewer total options; higher prices; and no commodity market for expansion cards.

[JdeBP]

At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024665, pjmlp has been propounding the myth that OS/2 required a PS/2. This is a myth, untrue of any version. I am surprised to see it still around, a quarter century or more after it was debunked.

[pjmlp]

Myth or not, in 1992 on my hometown it was only possible to get legal OS/2 2.0 copies when buying a PS2.

Only one IBM dealer was selling PS2 with them.

OS/2 2.0 wasn't nowhere else to be found and I didn't knew anyone to get me a pirate copy of OS/2 2.0 just to try it out on a PC clone.

So regardless of you calling me a liar, in 1992 on a small Portuguese town, getting OS/2 2.0 on a legal way, required buying a PS2 with it bundled at the local IBM dealer.

And for what I could remeber it was pretty much like that across the country until OS/2 Warp got released.

[JdeBP]

One IBM dealer not being willing/permitted to sell you OS/2 pre-loaded on anything other than a PS/2 is a very different thing to OS/2 requiring a PS/2. That you continue to conflate the twain is an error, and a repetition of a long since debunked myth.

This was written in 1995, and was far from the first debunking of this myth:

* http://www.mit.edu/activities/os2/faq/os2faq0201.html

The unwillingness of that one IBM dealer was almost certainly far more to do with the structures of the Microsoft licensing deals for pre-loaded systems than any mythical requirement of a PS/2. This came to light some years later; around the time of the US DOJ anti-trust case.

To learn how for a quarter of a century you've erroneously been ascribing things to the myth that OS/2 required a PS/2 when in fact your one IBM dealer was merely part of a larger and complex picture of licensing deals and royalty payments involving pre-loading Windows on IBM machines versus pre-loading anything else, start here:

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/368660.stm

* http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/06/04/ibm_witness_the_insi...

There is a lot more to read than just those two, of course.

[pjmlp]

Fair enough, I will look into them.

[brudgers]

I don't understand how this relates to my comment.