Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system?
This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM’s OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT’s technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001.
↫ Object listing at the Smithsonian
The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it’s not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O’Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more.
A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.
They actually “half” delivered that promise, too.
Original NT systems, being a micro kernel, natively supported OS/2 executables out of the box.
Yes, NT was not a “Windows”. The WIN32 API on top of it was just a “persona”. They kept the OS/2 persona. but only for command line applications. Unfortunately Presentation Manager was not there, so no UI applications worked.
(They also had their XENIX / UNIX persona, and NT was POSIX compliant long before any version Linux. They later had Linux kernel persona in WSL1.0 and Linux programs also run “natively” on NT during Windows 10 era. Later they switched to an emulation based version in WSL2.0 as direct translation of syscalls turned out to be not as performant as they expected. Especially for I/O. Turns out NTFS was not a good fit).
Anyway, if IBM was not so stubborn, and insisted on paying by “lines of code”, we would be in a very different world now.
It was there, it just wasn’t the default. You can grab it here: https://archive.org/details/pmntd-5
Of course Microsoft had no reason to deliver it by default, but it was supported on all versions of Windows NT, it was only dropped with Windows 2000 (but that’s no longer “NT”, now, is it?).
What I found interesting in these docs is their original target was the 32 bit OS/2 API, and the final released one was the 16 bit OS/2 API. The docs still seem to be command line focused though – it only includes Dos32 APIs, not Win/Gpi or even Vio.
malxau,
Interesting, I did not know that detail.
If I were to guess, 32 bit OS/2 was the plan, but they stopped developing mid cycle (for obvious reasons) and when NT was released, they just included what was already finished.
In an ironic twist, OS/2 Warp had Win 3.1 (16 bit) support as well. That made software developers lazy and only release Win versions, as they knew it would work on both platforms. And of course that reduced the number of native ones.
On NT you could bring your OS/2 programs (command line of course, … and 16 bit? wow)… But if you wanted a UI, you had to “speak” Win 32.
you could run graphical OS/2 programs on NT, they were limited to 16 bits though.
FWIW developers are not “lazy,” they have this weird thing where they like to earn a living 😉
Windows was a huge market, OS/2 not so much. So Windows is where the developer interest/focus went.
Also OS/2 really did not have much of a value proposition compared to windows, esp after NT.
IBM really really did not read the room of where computing was going in the 80s.
Xanady Asem,
That is fair. Time is valuable.
But I really wish we had infinite time. There is really so much to be done.
WSL 1.0 could have been great. It’s a real shame it wasn’t pursued further.
If ReactOS matures enough, it’d make a great base for an OS/2 compatible system, and i dream of a BeOS subsystem too. NT is a solid and flexible core, easily moulded to whatever userland you wish to run on top.
Reactos has been at it for 20+ years, it’s never going to happen at this point.
Of course it would. When Microsoft would be banned in some countries people would naturally have to bring ReactOS to the useful state.
We are moving there, if slowly.
I have heard that argument for almost all those 20+ years, alas…
Yes. In a sane world it would have happened 20 years ago — but we don’t live in such a world: it would have been easy for the West to do that 20 years ago — and then West could have kept its leadership for half-century or more.
Instead West allowed itself to lose key technologies that were moved to other places (Uran Enrichment was concentrated in Russia, most powerful chips are all made in Taiwan and so on).
This doesn’t mean separation wouldn’t happen, it just means it would be slower and messier.
Okaaaaay?
They are moving to Linux. No one is going to use a barely functional clone of an ancient version of Windows that is realistically never going to be finished.
The smart ones who are doing that now, when they could do that slowly, are moving to Linux, sure. The ones who would be forced to move in hurry… would have to go with ReactOS.
There would simply not be enough time to develop Linux versions of apps that they have.
Pretty sure China was banning Microsoft from coming in during the XP era, which just led to everyone pirating XP.
Interesting how initially the documents refer to NT OS/2, and then once Cutler et al take over it is Windows NT from 1990 on.