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Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

Mostly wrong IMO. NT is more like VMS rewritten + pieces of MS code integrated (or rewritten), certainly not a "portable OS/2". The OS/2 parts were confined in the subsystem and are now extinct. As for the IBM did not know how to do OSes opinion, that's both kind of a joke and meaningless: in gigantic organizations, there is not a single mind and single centralized knowledge about X or Y. It bowl down to smaller teams, or even sub-teams. And if there were, "IBM" has done plenty of OSes, and some of them have been in service and backward compat for way longer than anything MS did, ever.

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NT is a new design by the people who were involved in VMS. Even when they didn't replicate everything, they had already acquired "taste" and "experience" so some solutions of some problems are very similar, to the point that knowing some detail in one OS gives you a good knowledge about the basics of the detail in another. But this is only in some aspects. There are a lot of important solutions that were made for the first time only in the NT.

The team developing NT had the requirements to fulfill that were never put in front of them, and their result was at the end something in many aspects fundamentally better than any competition. There are of course some aspects that the competition did better too, but that was not enough to win the market.

Whoever really wants to learn more about how it was made, including a lot of details about the humans involved, should read the very good written book

"Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" (1994) by G. Pascal Zachary

> Whoever really wants to learn more about how it was made, including a lot of details about the humans involved, should read the very good written book "Show Stopper!...

I can't recommend this book enough. It's a very interesting story and gave me an appreciation for what it takes to do big things in the software industry.

Yes - IBM was doing virtual machines back in the mid 1980s (I was using them on IBM's VM/CMS), long before such things appeared on unix-like or windows OSs.

The amount of cool, ground-breaking stuff that IBM has done is severely under-estimated. I wouldn't count OS/2 as a part of that, however.

> I wouldn't count OS/2 as a part of that, however.

OS/2 1.3 came out at the beginning of 1990 and OS/2 2.x came out 1992.

By comparison Windows 95 came out in 1995.

So you need to compare OS/2 to MS-DOS, Windows 3.x and the Apple Macintosh systems of that time and by that comparison OS/2 was very good.

In the early 90's I did a lot of development for OS/2, MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and OS/2 had the big advantage that a bug in your code would only crash your program where asd for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x it crashed the OS and required a full reboot.

The fatal mistake IBM made was to hobble OS/2 2.x to the 80286 processor.

By staying with the 80286 processor it meant OS/2 ran really struggled to run MS-DOS and Windows programs and that meant businesses just stayed with MS-DOS and Windows.

If they had just gone with the 80386 processor (like they did 2 years later with OS/2 3.X) it would have meant the end of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x only because that later version of OS/2 ran Windows and MS-DOS programs better than Windows 95 which was still a year way.

You're getting your versions mixed up there. It's OS/2 1.x that ran on the 286. 2.x and later required a 386.

I just checked Wikipedia and you are correct.

It was the OS/2 1.3 release that should have been targeted at the 386 chip.

NTFS is a evolution of OS/2 filesystem.

it's also an evolution of ODS-2 filesystem, so...

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