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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about that “adults” comment. Microsoft grew their operating system up from a very low base where the “adults” moved theirs down. For most users, windows NT was ridiculous overkill.

At the time most users and businesses didn’t own a PC that could do the virtualisation tricks required by windows 3 (o windows 2 386). A lot of places still had XT class machines right up to the end of the 1980s.

So the Microsoft guys had a pretty complex landscape in which Windows had to operate and they managed a fantastically complicated solution. They were definitely adulting hard during that time.

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I didn't mean to imply there was something "less" about the talent creating the DOS-based Windows OS. I think it's a marvel of engineering for economy and constraints.

I think NT was a means to an end (government contracts requiring a "Rainbow book"-qualified OS). It was a long time before the DOS-based Windows OS lost its position as the consumer / business offering. I think that shows MSFT knew what they had in that legacy code and leveraged it for great profit for a long time.

I think the "adults" came in and made a stuffy buttoned-down operating system meant to qualify as a "C2"-compliant OS meant to win contracts. NT doesn't have the hacky charm of the DOS-based Windows versions.

> I didn't mean to imply there was something "less" about the talent creating the DOS-based Windows OS. I think it's a marvel of engineering for economy and constraints.

"DOS-based Windows" was not an OS. It was effectively a program which provided a green thread[0] execution model for cooperative processes to execute within and had the reliability one would expect from same.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_thread

Windows/386, and later 3.x and 9x, was a virtual machine monitor that could run 16-bit operating systems with 32-bit drivers.

The desktop environment you saw was nothing but the main virtual machine, and inside that was the green thread environment you describe. But the VMM on the outside was pretty solid.

> Windows/386, and later 3.x and 9x, was a virtual machine monitor that could run 16-bit operating systems with 32-bit drivers.

Those were not "DOS-based Windows". If your position is Windows/386 et al were OSs which supported running MS-DOS programs, I agree. But that is not "DOS-based" so much as "can run DOS programs."

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