Despite all of the litigation, Windows 2 made it to market, gained 3rd party support, and signaled a massive transition in computing that all of the competition had failed to do. With Windows 2, millions of people were using a graphical desktop with graphical applications. The mouse was made a standard tool. PCs were now being urged to adopt powerful graphics adapters. Many people claim Windows 2 to be a failure, but this is not an accurate assessment. While it didn’t sell to the level of later releases, the market hadn’t really become accustomed to buying an operating system on a store shelf. People typically received an OS as part of a computer purchase. That Microsoft was able to sell over 2 million copies of Windows 2 shows a serious change; MS-DOS’s days were now numbered.
I’ve always considered Windows 1.0 and 2.0 to be false starts, failed attempts at what would become Windows 3.x. This article makes the case that Windows 2.0 was more important and successful than we give it credit for today.
Windows 2.0 was definitely not a false start, it was a valid stepping stone to 3.0. Win2 had a valid, working virtual memory management system. It had the whole handles process which was weird and powerful. I understand That Win2 on a 286 would re-write the calling stack. I can’t remember why but it worked. I came into Win3 application development with a background in UNIX. So it was the big Petzold book and learning to send messages and process events. Win2 evolved into NT with the help of Dave Cutler. it evolved into OS/2 with the help of IBM.
Not touched on in the article was how complex of a piece of software Windows 2.0 actually was.
Namely, starting with Windows/386 2.0.1, Windows was a fully 32-bit pre-emptively multitasked hypervisor that ran a virtual machine with a modified Windows 2.0 instance, plus a virtual machine for each DOS app. The virtual machines were pre-emptively multitasked (With the Windows apps cooperatively multitasked within the Windows VM), and were hooked in a manner that kept the filesystem coherent between all DOS VMs. The version of Windows that ran in the VM was specific to running in the VM; It was different from both Windows/286 and Windows 2.0.1 on an 8088/8086.