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liam_on_linuxIt was developed on the Intel i860 CPU, codenamed N-Ten, on in-house made MS motherboards. Obviously MS wasn’t going to call it OS/2 anything – that was the failed IBM project, the future was Windows.
So it became Windows for N-Ten. “Windows NT,” later retconned “New Technology”.
The first version, NT 3.1, appeared in 1993 – the number derived from the then-current DOS-based version, and also due, I think, to a licensing deal with Novell allowing MS to use Novell developer info (e.g. to develop a Netware client) but only in Windows up to 3.1.
But until NT, OS/2 2.x was the most advanced PC OS for 386s. No mucking around with upper memory blocks, XMS, EMS and all that nonsense. DOS apps, Windows 3 apps, and a native 32-bit OS with no memory constraints. A new filesystem with long filenames (derived straight from OS/2 1.x and therefore 16-bit code). An advanced, if clunky, “object oriented” GUI.
OS/2 2 was impressive stuff. Linux was skeletal, pre-alpha, back then. PC versions of BSD was a bit better but the vaguely usable versions were commercial. Commercial Unix was either horribly expensive (e.g. Interactive) or horribly limited (e.g. Coherent). And by and large there wasn’t anything else at all.
Oddly, what made me move from OS/2 wasn’t NT. NT was lovely, but expensive and required expensive high-end kit, with a small Hardware Compatibility List. Forget using it on an old “bitsa” PC built from scrap.
OS/2 2 worked on that, with effort. Stacker, bodged-on SCSI storage, PC speaker sound or crappy parallel-port sound cards, crazy mice with numeric keypads: they worked.
Not on NT, they didn’t.
But on the beta of Windows 95, they did, like a dream, easier, faster, and with a better UI. Less stable, but better DOS and Win32 compatibility. You could run NT apps! (All right, yes, both of them.)
OS/2 was great. NT 3.x was theoretically better, if you had a £5000 PC. But Windows 95, while conceptually worse in design terms, actually did what you needed, was easier to get working, had a better UI and let you use the apps you needed and your legacy stuff too.
Sad but true. I switched.
I did look back. OS/2 Warp 3 didn’t work well on my old PC – it needed new drivers for various bits. (And you had to buy OS/2 device drivers for some kit.) It really needed higher-end kit. Windows 95B brought improvements I actually benefited from, like FAT32, and ones I could see being useful in future, like USB support. At work, NT 3.51 looked ugly but it worked well. The hardware had caught up and there were 32-bit apps.
OS/2 Warp 4 caught up in some ways, but it was too late. NT 4 came out the same year.
NT4 was far preferable to OS/2 Warp 4. No 1000+ line CONFIG.SYS files, decent driver support, a more modern filesystem. No USB, true. Lousy power management, lousy plug-and-play. Good for a work desktop with unchanging hardware. Poor on a laptop. But if you wanted toys or games, Win98 followed soon after.
And NT Server made a great server for Win9x, as well as NT desktops. It had some great, rarely-considered features: roaming profiles, for instance. Proxy servers were very easy, far easier than on Netware. (Novell was off chasing big-business multi-site multi-server networks with Netware 4, and took its eyes off the ball: small business with a shared Internet connection.)
A bundled email client on the client end, and cheap off-the-shelf email servers for the server (before the behemoth Exchange crushed them all). IBM didn’t bother stuff like that, because it had Lotus Notes.
OS/2 was good in its day. If IBM hadn’t insisted on 80286 support, it would have triumphed. But then we wouldn’t have got Win9x or NT, both honestly really good products which advanced the state of the PC art.
By the same token, if GNU had embraced the BSD kernel in 1988 or so, we might never have got Linux, and there would have been a good free PC Unix at the beginning of the 1990s, maybe significantly changing the perspective of the whole industry. It nearly happened.
Or if Quarterdeck had released DESQview/X earlier, before Windows 3.0, there would have been an alternative, bridging the worlds of MS-DOS and Unix: DOS with multitasking, TCP/IP and an X.11 GUI. It nearly happened, too.
Windows NT was allegedly partly developed on OS/2. Many MSers loved OS/2 at the time -- they had co-developed it, after all. But there was more to it than that.
Windows NT was partly based on OS/2. There were 3 branches of the OS/2 codebase:
[a] OS/2 1.x – at IBM’s insistence, for the 80286. The mistake that doomed OS/2 and IBM’s presence in the PC industry, the industry it had created.
[b] OS/2 2.x – IBM went it alone with the 80386-specific version.
[c] OS/2 3.x – Portable OS/2, planned to be ported to multiple different CPUs.
After the “divorce”, MS inherited Portable OS/2. It was a skeleton and a plan. Dave Cutler was hired from DEC, which refused to allow him to pursue his PRISM project for a modern CPU and successor to VMS. Cutler got the Portable OS/2 project to complete. He did, fleshing it out with concepts and plans derived from his experience with VMS and plans for PRISM.