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.
Not only did I live through this era of operating systems, I’m also a voracious reader of the history of tech companies and have read dozens of books on Microsoft and IBM history, and yet never once have I heard many of the claims in this article. I’d take it with a grain of salt if it were me.
> DEC cancelled it. Cutler and his team left and went to Microsoft. MS didn't know what to do with this élite group so it gave them OS/2 3 to finish.<p>Based on the Showstoppers book -- it's more like: Bill Gates knew the days of Windows 3.x were limited, and needed a new, next generation operating system.<p>Gordon Bell convinced Bill Gates to call David Cutler, of VMS/DEC fame (Bill Gates was always impressed with DEC as an engineering company).<p>Cutler was like, "what, come work for that dinky company that makes crappy Office docs and a shitty OS? Psscht."<p>Bill persisted, saying it'll be a brand new OS that he'll lead. Cutler insisted only if he got to bring his DEC team (like, 200+ people) and basically got whatever he wanted. Bill obliged.<p>NT development started in '89.<p>Such a pivotal moment in computing history. If I ever got to chat to Bill Gates, I'd ask him what he was more proud of: a) getting Cutler on board for NT, or b) orchestrating the backward-compat mindset that set up the Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Windows NT -> Windows XP transition.
It is hard to pull an accurate history from a couple decades ago. All I know is that when I worked at IBM in those days, a few coders told me that OS/2 was supposed to be an OS for mainframe controllers, but that it got usurped by people with other ideas, and was just another project that wasn't going to fly very far.<p>I didn't know whether that was true, why they said it, or what really was going on with the people involved. But I remember the comment and always take what I hear about the history of projects with a grain of salt.
There's some misstatements in there. "IBM developed OS/2 2 on its own" is definitely not true. I was working with OS/2 1.x and receiving frequent drops of early development versions of OS/2 2.x all clearly from Microsoft on floppies with Microsoft OS/2 2.0 all over them. I even went to MS's Redmond campus for several weeks of OS/2 API programming. What is true is that MS was tasked with the OS/2 3.x effort while IBM carried on with the OS/2 2.x line.<p>At the time, the Windows 9x vs OS/2 2.x didn't have a clear expected winner. In the end the doom of OS/2 was due a lack of applications. There were other contributing factors like how IBM simultaneously launched the PS/2 line and the OS/2 1.x version were rarely run on non-IBM hardware (v1.3 ran like a dream on PC clones though.)
The WinOS2 development was an incredible marketing and technical marvel. Codenamed Ferengi and sold as "OS/2 for Windows" it allowed you to 'upgrade' your Windows-license installation to run OS/2 with Windows 3.1 running on top of OS/2. It would be like installing Linux on a Windows machine and getting Linux and Wine. Before it was done, most everyone was saying that it wasn't possible. It ran most of the native windows drivers the main thing that was tricky was sharing the screen to have seamless Windows rectangles overlapping with OS/2 rectangles.<p>I personally didn't care for running cooperatively scheduled Windows 16-bit apps on a 32-bit OS.
Mark Russinovich, the current CTO of Azure at Microsoft, wrote an article years ago pointing out that Windows NT was more than "influenced" by VMS and at the deepest levels it was closer to a rewrite of VMS from VAX assembly language into C.<p>Components evolved during the rewrite and, of course, there were many new things added, (Win32, NTFS, etc) but the base is the same.<p><a href="https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story" rel="nofollow">https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...</a>