This wasn’t just a business fight.
It was a design philosophy clash about what an operating system should depend on, and what it should never trust.
At the center of it all was one question:
Should an OS belong to a processor or should it outlive processors?
Where OS/2 Came From (And Why It Made Sense)
OS/2 was born in the late 1980s, when the PC world felt… settled.
Intel ruled.
x86 was everywhere.
DOS was choking under real workloads.
IBM looked at the landscape and thought:
“The PC is x86.
Let’s build the best possible OS for this machine.”
That decision shaped everything.
OS/2 leaned hard into Intel:
• protected mode
• segmentation
• 386 features
• tight hardware coupling
And honestly?
On Intel hardware, OS/2 was beautiful.
Fast.
Stable.
Great multitasking.
Excellent DOS compatibility.
It felt like DOS finally grew up.
But OS/2 Trusted the Hardware Too Much
OS/2 assumed something very dangerous:
“The processor won’t change in any meaningful way.”
The kernel knew too much about x86.
Too many assumptions were baked in.
Too much logic depended on Intel behaving exactly as expected.
This made OS/2:
• hard to port
• hard to evolve
• hard to escape its own success
OS/2 wasn’t portable because it didn’t want to be.
IBM believed control was strength.
Windows NT Was Designed by People Who Didn’t Trust Hardware
Windows NT came from a very different mindset.
The engineers behind NT had worked on big systems.
They’d seen hardware come and go.
They didn’t trust any CPU to stay dominant forever.
So NT started with a rule:
“The OS must not care what processor it runs on.”
That rule sounds abstract but it changed everything.
NT Didn’t Optimize for Speed It Optimized for Survival
Early Windows NT was not fast.
Compared to OS/2, it felt:
• heavy
• complex
• slower on the same hardware
But NT had something OS/2 didn’t:
distance from the processor.
NT introduced a layer whose entire job was to absorb hardware differences.
The kernel talked to ideas, not silicon quirks.
To NT, a CPU was just:
• registers
• interrupts
• memory behavior
Everything else was negotiable.
OS/2 Was a Perfect PC OS
NT Was a Portable Systems OS
This is the real split.
OS/2 asked:
“How do we get the most out of this PC?”
NT asked:
“What happens when this PC stops being the PC?”
OS/2 squeezed performance from Intel.
NT sacrificed performance to gain flexibility.
At the time, OS/2 looked smarter.
In the long run, NT looked inevitable.
Why Processor Portability Quietly Killed OS/2
In the early 90s, the future looked uncertain.
RISC CPUs were hot.
Workstations mattered.
Servers mattered.
PCs were growing up.
NT could follow the market.
OS/2 couldn’t.
Even though x86 eventually did win, the damage was already done:
• vendors saw NT as future-proof
• enterprises trusted NT’s architecture
• developers bet on longevity, not speed
Once NT became the safe bet, OS/2’s fate was sealed.
The Tragic Irony
Here’s the painful part.
OS/2 didn’t lose because it was bad.
It lost because it was too confident.
It assumed the world would stay stable.
NT assumed the world would change.
The world always changes.
What Developers Should Actually Learn From This
This story has nothing to do with IBM vs Microsoft.
It’s about this lesson:
Never let your core depend on something you don’t control forever.
Hardware changes.
Markets shift.
Architectures die.
OS/2 trusted hardware.
NT distrusted it.
Only one of those philosophies survives decades.
Final Thought
OS/2 was a masterpiece for its moment.
Windows NT was awkward, heavy, and over-engineered.
But NT was built for a future nobody could fully see.
And operating systems don’t win by being perfect today.
They win by still existing tomorrow.
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