Duke - Your history is a little rusty - the base design for NT was done in 1988-89, originally targeted at the Intel i860, a RISC processor. But Intel did not do well with the i860 and MS shifted the NT development to the MIPS processor in 1991. This was a part of the impetus for ACE - a new, RISC based OS from MSFT and the chance to re-unite a fractured Unix... this was also part of the reason for the POSIX code in NT.
NT was available in its MIPS flavor to developers in 1991, although it was not a released product (it was scheduled for release in early 1992 and would have made it except for the shift to add Windows compatability). At that time, NT was a "Next Generation" OS/2 kind of thing and most of the "big" MS products (for example SQL Server) still ran on OS/2. But it was not NT which killed OS/2 but the conflict over both size of the OS/2 3.1 edition (MS had "OS/2 on a diet" which would run in 2 MB while IBM stuck with the 4MB version) and the success of Windows 3.0, the first Windows product which actually had good support from software developers.
MS had planned to use Windows as a transition product for DOS users to get to OS/2, but IBM didn't want to make OS/2 compatible with Windows unless they got the IP rights to windows as a part of the deal.
Lots of interesting history there - a case where IBM's greed kept them from doing a deal which would have relegated Windows to a minor role - there was only a small Windows development team and it had little internal support. But IBM's behavior left an opening which MS exploited, and when Windows took off, NT development was shifted to include x86 and a great degree of Windows compatibility. This change delayed actual product launch from early 1992 to late 1993 and also changed NT from the next generation of OS/2 into the OS/2 killer. |
