Oh ok, so is Windows 8 working better than Windows 98 SE?!

For a lot of reason I think :

1 . Dos started to be outdated, was complicated to update and anyway, MS wanted to hide it from user (Windows ME without reboot into dos support ...)

2. NT was stable, NT was already working on lot of new computer, since DOS was not something acceptable for the future, they just decided to re-use NT instead of redeveloping something else.

3. Network : Home PCs are now connected to network like office pc was, everyone use a DSL/CABLE/FTTH box who also work as a router, people get more and more PCs and filesharing at home use SMB generally, NT was designed for Network, not dos

Sarcasm?
Of course every NT system works better than a DOS system

Sure it's called 'startup.cmd' ... It *IS* OS/2 3.0 afterall

I think one of the overreaching things was that the core of Windows 95/98/Me was Windows/386 which had been shipping since 1987! On the flip side, writing VxD's was done in assembly ... while in NT you wrote drivers in C... But yeah by the time NT 3.1 shipped in 93, you had six years of the VM386 + friends out there! Although the vxd/v86 stuff was weird, even OS/2 had int13.sys its not like calling into VM's and BIOS was that unheard of but NT made things 'clean' with no BIOS access which introduced that learning curve people love so much.

Even at the Windows "Higher" level, you had Microsoft writing that multitasking 'european DOS 4 (has anyone ever found it?????)' where they developed a lot of the underpinnings of what they wanted to do for the future with movable, discardable segments with that magical LINK4 .. If you ever get to thumb through the 1st edition Petzoid book, its really interesting as they really wrote Windows 1.0 almost thinking it'd run in protected mode but seemingly forced back to real mode for application compatibility no doubt. In some ways OS/2 was a major detour but at the same time there seems to be this feeling of a preemptive multitasking protected windows from the 80's .... But Microsoft felt it needed IBM to win big businesses and ISV contracts. Windows 3.0 changed everything though. And OS/2 2.0 just proved too difficult and too big to push out the door, hell OS/2 2.0 was basically ready but got pushed back when Windows 3.0 shipped as even IBM saw the writing on the wall that if they shipped something that couldn't run Windows 3.0 apps it was dead.

Pricing was another thing people are forgetting, DOS was $50 for no name OEM's and windows ran $99 ... While 'professional' OS's like OS/2 would run you $300 (plus a DOS license because you know, MS bundling!) ... So guess what you shipped on all your pc's ??? DOS at least, and eventually DOS+Windows because you wanted to curry favor with Microsoft. Then they dropped the price of Office to the price of Lotus 1-2-3 and basically smashed the competition... And of course going back to the OEM bundles you could bundle in DOS+WIndows+Office for way cheap... so yeah everyone uses MS Office now.

Before Windows 3.0 the GUI market 'of the future' was pretty open ... Why did other vendors fail? OEM lockout from system builders certainly contributed, but as Balmer says its all about developers... And trying to make money off of SDK's and compilers (which was their core business before going into OS/Office) proved to be a mistake, as you want people to have your tools as even 'accidental' people will write programs for your OS, which means a sale if it interests other people to run that program. I'm surprised that MS is going to reverse that idea with the next version of VS that won't include C++... big mistake!

Balmer needs to go! Now he's locking out developers, and [censored] off OEMs...

If there wasn't 10,000 linux distros people really would think about pushing something else. Or if google can contain al the android fragmentation.

When I had to do PC desktop support (lol this'll show my age) I used to keep a Zip disk of NT 3.51 that I could boot with a floppy & parallel port ZIP to do things like run chkdsk etc... Very handy! .. Even for building new systems, it was nice to format the WHOLE hard disk NTFS instead of NT 4.0 doing that weird FAT16 partition that it then converts to NTFS ... (wtf?)

I almost need to install NT 3.1 again to see if I am remembering this right, but couldn't NT 3.1 convert FAT to HPFS?

I always liked NTLDR as it was more flexable than OS2LDR esp being able to use NT disk drivers, and booting off a floppy and mounting out NT on IDE or SCSI (parallel zip...) ...

Too bad IBM never did anything about the ancient boot stuff...

Oh wasn't it DOS X (single digit versions), OS/2 1.x being 10.x, and OS/2 2.x+ being 20.x with NT (OS/2 NT) being 30.x ....?

Triple post....Merge them...