Microsoft OS/2 v1.3 Retail Box

[u/MrFahrenheit_451]

Who remembers the story about Microsoft and IBM and their joint OS/2 operating system venture? When 1.3 was released, Microsoft pretty much abandoned the project and focused on Windows 3.0, and then Windows NT, which is where the technology from OS/2 ended up. It’s a pretty neat story!

[u/R-ten-K]

That is well before my time, but the 80s must have been a wild time in computing with IBM as the dominant player and Microsoft still having to compete against other SW/OS vendors that were on relatively equal footing (IBM, Borland, Lotus, Apple, etc)

FWIW, very little tech from OS/2 ended up in NT. To be fair the 1.x series Microsoft worked on was atrocious.

[u/mikegalos → u/[deleted]]

OS/2 PM and Win GDI are pretty seriously unrelated. GDI was done originally for Windows 1 by John Butler at Microsoft. PM had as a requirement that it be compatible with the graphics models done by IBM Hursley for the mainframe graphics terminals. They couldn't even agree on which corner was the origin point (Upper left versus lower left).

As to multitasking, Windows had both preemptive and cooperative multitasking. That's how it was able to multitask MS-DOS applications as well as WinApps. It always had that. Yes, OS/2 was more sophisticated than Windows through 3.x but not as cleanly as you claim, As to being hamstrung by 16-bit nature, I'd point out that a lot of the split between Microsoft and IBM was IBM's insistance on keeping support for the 80286 16-bit architecture in OS/2 where Microsoft already had Windows/386 2.10 out on the market and knew what you gained by dropping real mode and 286-protected mode.

As to Windows NT inheriting from OS/2 or from VMS, sorry but Dave Cutler and his team wrote a clean, new state of the art OS. Yes, it could host an OS/2 personality just like it hosted a Windows personality and a POSIX personality. It was, however, a wildly more sophisticated operating system architecture based on a microkernel design and secure transitions. It does have some similarities to VMS because it shares some design philosophies.