On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 16:36 +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
My suspicion is that MS decided that an inferior product with Windows compatibility was a better marketing proposition than the better OS without. Windows didn't come close to being as good as OS/2 until NT4 and then was still lacking. XP has added eye candy and from my experience less stability than NT4 - that said on my old NT4 workstation I had to reinstall every few months to fix it (bugs like all the icons vanishing in the control panel).
I recall reading public statements even from BG himself saying that OS/2 was the future. I think in the end it might have been disagreements between MS and IBM killed the collaboration project and IBM went alone.
I think the breakup started because OS/2 was originally designed for the IBM PS/2* and a lot of PS/2's were sold on the promise that they would run future versions of OS/2.However Microsoft were pushing to develop and OS that took advantage of the 80386, this was a problem for IBM because all those PS/2 machines were 286.
The breakup agreement was that both companies would split and develop OS/2 to their own means whilst retaining some degree of compatibility (starting to sound like a Unix now isn't it)
Then Microsoft got lucky by hiring a key VMS architect (I forget who) and therefore NT became more of a Microsoft interpretation of VMS rather than Microsoft's version of OS/2 (there is a strong rumour I heard once that internal beta builds of NT actually still carried the OS/2 name in certain parts of the OS) The agreement stood however and NT was capable of running (to varying degrees) OS/2 applications, talk to OS/2 boxes and access HPFS volumes etc
IBM countered a year or so later by offering OS/2 2.0 which could run a modified copy of Windows 3 in a DOS window, I think in subsequent versions it was even possible to run Windows and OS/2 applications side by side in the same workspace. Funnily enough the minimum requirements for 2.0 were indeed a 80386 which just goes to show that even IBM didn't know what they were doing sometimes.
* The PS/2 suddenly starts to make a bit more sense when you look at it in this context. As a regular PC it was a little strange as it had dropped lots of legacy PC features and replaced them with incompatible alternatives (3.5" floppy, PS/2 KB/Mouse ports, Microbus rather than ISA) etc etc. The point was that these machines were supposed to be a whole new platform and not as they ended up just a revision to DOS/Windows PC's
Right (possibly inaccurate) history lesson over..I am sure there is someone reading this far and still awake