Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3031 mails)

[Kai Ponte <kai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.
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