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Comment by magoon | Hacker News Reader

Little-known fact: Windows of today is an entirely different OS than early DOS-based Windows because Microsoft took ownership of the 386-based “OS/2 3.0” codebase it jointly developed with IBM, forming the foundation for Windows NT 3 which all modern Windows is based on. This gave them the huge head start in having a modern enterprise-grade operating system that allowed them to dominate the market.

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I don't think that's the case; Cutler's NT has VMS-esque foundations, not OS/2.

Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT. Due to the architecture of NT, it could support many different APIs.

Due to the success of Windows 3.0 and the lack of OS/2 success, Microsoft wisely decided to expand the Windows API to the Win32 API and have it be the default API.

The book Show Stopper, has a good account of the early days of NT.

https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

It is interesting read.

Original NT contained an OS/2 subsystem layer too, like WSL today. It allowed running of OS/2 1.x apps.

WSL is vastly different from the old-school NT subsystems. Both in the technology and in the result. And rightly so, because while SFU&co was in some way more integrated, it effectively was a separate platform from anything else, and who want to support that? Arguably the OS/2 subsystem did not have this problem because the environment/ecosystem to support was way smaller, and it was making existing binaries made for this system work. So on that last point, yes WSL is similar to the OS/2 subsystem; but it could not have been like that in SFU because Linux was not seen as a serious competitor at the time (and well, it actually was not...); and the price to pay now that co-evolution did not happen is a more segregated environment.

Indeed, there's no relationship between OS/2 and NT core, other than historic naming. NT is a cleaner, OO-style reimplementation of many core concepts behind VMS, to sometimes funny extent.

The programming API for use by userland started out as OS/2 though.

Russinovich claims it was an OpenVMS clone and upgrade with some convincing evidence:

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

That gave them a huge lead in developing a server-grade OS. They probably just used OS/2 for the OS/2 part that ran on top of it. Fast forward to today, the result still isn't robust as its predecessor in cluster configuration or the AS/400 Microsoft ran on before using their own product. They did show how much better VMS could've been as a desktop... by dominating on the desktop. :)

I didn't work for Microsoft, but I don't believe that Windows NT and OS/2 Warp had much significant in common, other than starting as a nominal "OS/2 3.0". The relationship between IBM and MS had fallen apart before 2.0 was released.

Yes, the "OS/2 3.0" was a marketing/naming thing, and was dropped when it became obvious that OS/2 wasn't going anywhere in the market.

There were some allegations that Cutler did a bit of a Levandowski on DEC. Or maybe it should be that Levandowski did a bit of a Cutler on Google.

Anyway, they settled out of court as long as MS promised to port Windows to DEC's Alpha.

Eh, there's a big difference between the two. Levandowski basically stole files from Google and gave them to Uber. Cutler just transferred his knowledge of building VMS to building Win NT. I suspect that's why it was settled out of court because the case was much much weaker that Cutler had stolen something tangible from DEC.

I'm not so sure about that. DEC may have simply decided to settle because fighting MS in open court would take a long time and deplete them of cash they needed very much (we all know how they ended up), Alpha was their hail-mary pass and having NT on Alpha could have strengthened their position.

Citation?

Wikipedia pages on NT, DEC, the Alpha microprocessor and Microsoft's general legal strategies would be an excellent starting point.

Cutler didn't stole files, as they would be pretty useless. But DEC had feathers ruffled because Cutler uprooted a team he picked for his attempt to do a modern rewrite of VMS, which Digital refused to do.

And it was a good team.

Friend of mine worked for a company that had a TCP/IP stack for VMS. He said they were asked how hard it would to port it to NT. The answer was trivial.

That said I think there is a difference between re-implementing APIs and stealing sources.

During early days of NT, if you wanted a port, you filled in a form and entered partnership where you were responsible for your system-specific code and MS cooperated with you.

Majority of NT/alpha work was done by team at DEC, later Compaq.

Another little know fact that I only discovered this week while listening to the coding after work podcast, is that some of the multitasking effort from DOS 4 (which apparently went nowhere), was actually integrated into OS/2 efforts.

That was a totally different DOS 4, which only surfaced relatively recently. (And the shipped versions apparently weren't fully featured either)

The shipped 4 versions were a consequence of the project's failure.

Like almost everyone else I kept to 3.3, totally ignoring 4.

Afterwards I actually ended up using DR-DOS 5 for a while, until MS-DOS 6 came out.

Yes, I heard that too.

Apple and MS basically bought their current incarnations of their respective OS at some point in the past.

Microsoft bought the first incarnation of their OS as well, licensing QDOS to become MSDOS.

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