On Friday 08 February 2008 08:55:22 am Mike wrote:
On Friday 08 February 2008 17:31, G T Smith wrote:
J Windows NT as originally designed was secure but a combination of inputs from the sales team and the application group compromised what was a reasonably secure design extremely badly. (Essentially Microsoft bought the VMS design team from Digital, and NT originally owed a lot to VMS). The windows 9x/98/Me code stream was really Windows(4?)/MSDOS 7 with the GUI as a compulsory option.
According to several folks, including IBM, Windows NT (new Technology) was a rebrand of OS/2 v3.0 when IBM and Microsoft parted ways. One link is http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html . I have a feeling that somewhere along the line, someone decided to combine VMS and OS/2 and see what happened.
They didn't actually combine VMS, just used the main developer. For that, they paid royally later and ended up supporting DEC Alpha machines for many years. I had several customers running Alpha machines with WinNT on board.
For years, all the incarnations of NT from 3.5 to 2000 had a directory under system called os2. I'd have to look at work, but I think the only file in that directory is os2.dll. I once deleted it just for fun, and the system ground to a halt. But I think that was NT4, and has since been fixed.
this is way off topic, but... OS/2 was a Joint IBM/Microsoft effort to develop a true 32-bit operating system. Microsoft was shut out of GUI development when Jobs was asked to leave Apple, and the new management refused to share GUI code with Microsoft. Windows was being developed but was a long way off and only a 16-bit shell over DOS. If you ever find a copy of OS/2 1.3 (I have one.) You'll see that it looks remarkably like Windows NT 3.5. The about screen says 1988 Microsoft / 1988 IBM. AFAIK, Microsoft was more interested in providing a desktop OS, while IBM still felt the desktop was a non-starter and wanted to make OS/2 more mainframe-centric. Hence, the two companies agreed to disagree and parted ways. Microsoft announced NT ("A better Unix than Unix.") at the '92 or '93 (I forget) CES show after taking notes about what Sun was already doing with its operating system. In any case, the resulting NT had to support multiple subsystems. In fact Win32 is just one subsystem. OS2 is another. (DOS and 16-bit apps run in a Virtual DOS Machine.) On all versions of NT though XP, you can run native OS2 16-bit command line and non-gui apps by calling the OS2 subsystem. (All UI is passed through the subsystems before being handed off to the kernel.) i believe they finally got rid of this in NT 6.0 (aka Vista), since I don't see an OS2.dll file anywhere. Sorry for the off-topic post (I know I'll hear it from Patrick.) but I thought y'all would be interested. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org