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That's the core irony of the PC revolution. PCs started out with the explicit goal of being something different than mainframes and minis. But when people started networking them together, the only way to keep them viable was to essentially turn them into mainframes and minis, just in different shaped boxes. So we've gotten to live through 20 years of PC vendors reinventing things that big-iron users had access to long ago.

One interesting part was that it had to become 10x to 100x cheaper to become viable on the PC platform: FPU, MMU, hardware virtualization, vector processors (aka GPUs), etc. It was possible for quite some time thanks to the Moore law.

And VMs that IBM invented on mainframes.

And containers that IBM invented on mainframes.

Including bytecode as executable format, with various ways to convert it into actual machine code before execution.

(The original idea behind) PCs continued to exist long after networking, in the form of video game consoles. A Gameboy Advance isn't all that different from an Apple II or an IBM-compatible PC running DOS: both focus on running one executable and giving it complete control over banging bits toward "rich" I/O devices, where instead of abstractions over ugly low-level interfaces, the peripherals have been designed with nice ABIs that are their canonical APIs (and, until the ARM era, the CPUs themselves were also designed such that their ISA, as written in macro-assembler, was the canonical "high-level" language.)

Of course, eventually game consoles became networked too...

I think it was Casey Muratori who made the argument that we could return to having nice ABIs that are canonical APIs, and still have more than one program running via hardware virtualization features. Then any OS would just be like a hypervisor managing all of the OS-less VMs that, from their perspective, are interacting directly with hardware. It was an interesting idea.

Heck, you can get away with that today, by just creating a virtualization platform like Xen, but with much more carefully-thought-out exposed virtio hypercalls; and then writing unikernels against that interface.

Though, from another perspective, this model is exactly what the "transitional" era of game consoles did. The Nintendo Wii U, for example, normally [i.e. during a game] has a unikernel running across two "application processor" cores, that sees those as the only cores and has direct ownership of the peripherals; but then the OS [running on a third, separate, low-power core that the game VM has no knowledge of] can, at any time, force the game VM into the background with an interrupt, whereupon it must relinquish one of its two cores, some memory, and not touch the peripherals at all until the OS says it's okay; and then the OS can use the borrowed high-power application core, memory, and peripheral-hardware ownership to temporarily foreground an OS modal GUI, like a game manual or a web browser or an instant message.

Sadly, this was all abstracted, for the game developer, behind an HLL [that is, C] SDK—which is sadly a "requirement" in the modern era, given that devs are going to be porting their games to/from PCs.

> I think it was Casey Muratori who made the argument that we could return to having nice ABIs that are canonical APIs

Here's the video I think you're referencing:

https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk

IIRC he mentions that he actually presented the same content in person to staff at Intel, and discusses how it's very hard to get any buy-in even if the engineers consider the approach to make sense.

I don’t think “reinventing” is entirely fair. Along the way, the PC vendors made this technology affordable for the masses. That’s huge.

>> at the hands of a former VAX software architect

Dave Cutler. I think he is still a Senior Technical Fellow at MS and a lead developer on Azure.

He also did a lot of work on the Xbox One hypervisor.

Interesting. I found this article about it, though it's not very technical: https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...

At the time this switchover was happening, I remember being pretty excited about things like protected memory. But in retrospect, I think it’s a shame there hasn’t really been a continuation of the “monitor” type interface. I could imagine them winning at things like minimising latency when responding to user input.

> If however you had already been experiencing systems like UNIX that ran on everything from mainframes to PDP-11/70's you would not have been quite so surprised.

Back then (R) there wasn't one UNIX, rather everyone had their flavour of it for their kind of machine. I don't think source compatibility became mainstream until the late 80s to 90s, before that it was all ports.

Maybe something happened with xp too, but "windows 2000" was the departure to "NT kernel" land for desktops/home users AFAIK. (I guess xp was really 2000 with windows 95 heritage bling added).

Maybe they did try to force windows millenium on poor saps parallel to w2k - and didn't quit that racket until xp?

Windows 2000 was not a home OS. Windows ME was. 2000 being NT and ME being DOS.

Sure it was. I ran NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000 at home. Avoided all the horrors of the DOS-based versions of Windows.

Microsoft finally got it right at Windows 7. It's been downhill since then, with Microsoft trying to make the desktop look like a phone.

I also ran those at home, they were sold in Workstation and Server variants, not as consumer OS.

The fact that you did is completely beside the point. I used 2k and NT at home too. Doesn't matter. It was never sold as or intended to be a consumer/home OS.

Office/business, not "consumer".

I know of non-technical users using PCs that came with win2k at that time so there was some level of win2k usage in intended for consumer machines, though maybe this was after ME acquired a bad reputation.

No, people used 2k privately because it happened to be better than ME and 98 and that kind of information gets around. I got my copy off a friend.

But I think 2000 introduced the "pro" licence/label, meaning it was aimed at business users. I can't recall there being a lot of "desktop pcs" or laptops with NT oem licenses, aimed at "business" users.

So it's probably correct that xp cut over and abandoned the win95 codebase - but I also think 2000 marked the start of that effort.

The Windows NT kernel always was Cutlers neat and tidy core with ugly parts bolted on because they somewhat made sense at the time. These parts are integrated pretty deeply so it’s quite hard to use this kernel in a system that’s not Windows with a desktop.

So although it’s a race for Microsoft against Microsoft but it’s still somewhat of an achievement they ended up with this result.

The evolution of DOS and Windows over the last 30 years makes me wonder if Windows is really even Windows.

It started out as a Windowing environment that ran on top of DOS but with Windows 95 it switched to a Windowing OS that also ran DOS. Later all of that was replaced with an entirely different OS (NT/XP) that basically supports the legacy OS in emulation.

NT had win32 from day one and it predates 95.

Yes and it wasn't really Windows. If you put a Windows 3.1 user in front of an NT machine they'd have been very confused.

You mean this one? [1] The shells in 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1/3.5 were identical. Except the latter wouldn't hard crash the machine every time a program did something naughty, which might indeed be confusing to a consumer 3.1 user...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1#/media/File:Win...

Win NT 3.X had the same interface with Program Manager.

If you put a Windows 3.1 user in front of a 95 machine they'd have been very confused. Exactly as confused, as it happens.

Although there are differences, many keyboard commands are the same, and some other stuff is also similar. Double clicking the icon to the left of the title closes the window, and double clicking the title maximizes the window, in both versions of Windows. ALT+F4 still closes the window, too. DOS commands are mostly the same (although Windows NT changes this somewhat, but still it is closely enough that you may be able to use without too much difficulty). All of this despite they move all of the menus around everywhere to make that stuff confusing.