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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

OS/2 and NT were the same codebase at one time. It was a joint IBM/Microsoft project.

Windows 3.x was way more successful than Microsoft anticipated. They wanted to pivot the Win32 layer in NT to be the primary API and make the user interface more Windows-like. IBM didn't want that so they parted ways.

David Cutler (designer of VMS) was the architect for NT. Many people don't know it has a single root filesystem that takes the unix philosophy even further... objects like mutexes exist in the root, not just files. Everything has full ACL support. The IO completion ports and async support were way ahead of their time. It originally even ran things like the video driver in user space.

Windows 3.x being so successful almost killed everything that was great about NT. It also caused Microsoft to completely miss the mobile revolution.

Success hides problems indeed.

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I worked on both OS/2 and NT and can say they were never the same code base. The NT kernel was 100% new code. At one point there was an effort to port the OS/2 GUI apis on top of the NT kernel. That effort was abandoned when it was decided to focus on a new 32 bit Windows API on NT. Scores of devs switched what they were working on overnight - fun times!

... and when they finally noticed their problem in mobile, it seems like all the good stuff was thrown out (e.g. .Net) in order to chase that tail. Seems they're finally coming around now with the windows store being opened for all windows apps (wow... duh?), but at the same time smartphones seem abandoned and tablets are IMO still clunky compared to iPads. Was Gates the genius behind dominating PC? Was his absence during the mobile revolution the reason for MS's relative stagnation (when compared to Apple's and Google's growth)?

At least looking at the stores, they seem to be making a come back at least in what concerns tablets/hybrid laptops.

Hybrid tablets have killed the netbooks and the majority of people are going for 2GB/4GB + 32/64 eMMC hybrids with Windows 10, and not to those Android ones that kind of look like a desktop. For most pockets across the world, an iPad Pro isn't an option.

The whole thing with .NET, Longhorn, Windows 7 and 10, was also a causality of the typical Windows Dev vs DevTools "wars" and most of us that follow MSFT blogs and news, know to which side Sinofsky was sponsoring.

Somehow UWP seems to be what .NET and eventually Longhorn should have been all along, lets see how it goes.

Appreciate the tips. In case you don't have it, here's the reference showing all the VMS stuff in NT:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

Be interesting at some point to collect all the attributes of NT to see what came from VMS, OS/2, UNIX, DOS, Win 3.x, etc. Then one might also see how it could be done even better esp without baggage. :)

Attending a session about the Windows internals at Microsoft was an eye opener for me, back when Windows 2000 was the latest version.

For those of us that enjoy delving into OS details, Windows is full of interesting goodies.

Even the way .NET is integrated with the OS, is somehow similar to how bytecode and JITs used to work in mainframes.

I always liked the architecture but just hated implementation and holdovers from prior business. Another goodie was how the DOS, etc subsystems are similar to the current container craze. I just wish BeOS advantages got merged in there early on. They buy them or something.

> Everything has full ACL support.

Got bitten by that once when i thought i could just copy the user dir between Windows installs and discovered that the registry had its own ACL on top of the FS ACL...

I was having a similar problem reinstalling Ubuntu last night. I couldnt copy files to external HD over permissions. Re-ran file manager with sudo. As root, I still couldnt do it. So I changed permissions of files until I could. I'd worry about changing them back but they were bookmark backups haha.

All that trouble to move files on a LiveCD that has full access to the disk anyway. Wth lol...

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