What was the importance of Windows 2000?

(Another recycled Quora answer)

It was a pivotal release of the NT family of OSes.

It is forgotten now but Microsoft has had multiple tries at creating operating systems. In the very early 1980s, it had its own UNIX, called Xenix, which it offered for multiple computer platforms including the Apple Lisa.

Xenix failed.

Then there was MS-DOS 4, an attempt to create a multitasking DOS. This failed, and was replaced with IBM’s PC DOS 4, which was a very simple enhancement of MS-DOS 3.3, supporting larger hard disk partitions and adding a simple graphical program launcher called DOSshell.

Then there was OS/2, co-developed with IBM, designed from the ground up to be a multitasking, networked OS. Unfortunately, IBM crippled it, by insisting that the new OS could run on 80286 computers, because IBM had sold thousands of 80286-based PS/2 computers and promised its customers that they would one day be able to run OS/2.

The customers didn’t care — they ran PC DOS on the machines and were happy. OS/2 should have targetted the new 80386 processor, which would have made it able to multitask DOS applications. But it didn’t, so it failed.

A desperate Microsoft adopted an unofficial back-room skunkworks project to improve the commercial failure that was Windows 2. This was called Windows 3 and it was a huge success, but it ran on top of the very limited MS-DOS. It was a technical triumph that Windows 3 worked as well as it did.

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