JC - re: Microsoft walked off with Windows 95 from the OS/2 project with IBM. Not the other way around
Y'all have once again drifted into an area where I have some personal history, and the notion that OS/2 was in any was a MSFT product from a technical standpoint is nonsense. Likewise that Win95 was an outgrowth of OS/2 - there is nearly 10 years between those developments and IBM had parted ways with MSFT over Windows 3.1, long before Win95 development was started.
Starting in 1985, I was involved in two separate efforts related to OS/2 - the first was driver development, and the second was work on some graphics routines. The design of the OS, the specifications, the SSA "vision", the interface to other IBM products... all of that was done by IBM. MSFT had some minor involvement in a few subsystems.
The MSFT guys were almost completely shut out of every important decision on the architecture and feature set of OS/2 - often they were not even consulted. This was IBM "taking back the OS". The IBM guys were doing the typical "big" design, full up specs, the works, and they regarded the MSFT guys as hackers without the discipline or skill to work on a "real" OS.
As far as the heritage of Windows, it owes nothing to OS/2. The original Windows team was a skunk works group and their product was regarded as a transitional product with no future. It was not until 1990, when MSFT realized that IBM had no intention of slimming down OS/2 to run acceptably in a 4MB machine, that MS got serious about Windows 3.0 as an alternative. That work was done not because MSFT really cared, but because the OEMs did - memory prices were shooting through the roof and everyone but IBM wanted a windowing OS that would run in 1MB. MSFT was already 2 years into the development of NT, which was their next-generation OS/2 replacement, and it was not until the runaway success of Windows 3.0 that anyone at MSFT took that development seriously.
There is simply no relationship between that OS/2 (or the subsequent versions, some of which were pretty good) and the MS Windows products - they were developed independently, there is no architectural similarity (unfortunately for Windows...) and there was not even much attempt to present compatible APIs. |
