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From: jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte ordering
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:34 +0100 (BST)
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In article <2024Oct6.150415@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

> I find it hard to believe that many customers would ask Intel 
> for something the 80286 protected mode with segments limited 
> to 64KB, and even if, that Intel would listen to them.  This 
> looks much more like an idee fixe to me that one or more of 
> the 286 project leaders had, and all customer input was made 
> to fit into this idea, or was ignored.

Either half-remembered from older architectures, or re-invented and
considered viable a decade after the original inventors had learned
better. 

> Another interpretation is that MS went faithfully into OS/2, 
> assigning not just their Xenix team to it (although according 
> to Wikipedia the Xenix abandonment by MS was due to AT&T 
> entering the Unix market) and reportedly also assigned the best 
> MS-DOS developers to OS/2.  They tried to stick to OS/2 for 
> several years, but eventually were fed up with all the bad 
> decisions coming from IBM, and bowed out.

It's known that they split the work with IBM, such the MS would do a
redesigned OS/2 that was intended to be version 3.0, while IBM
concentrated on 2.0. A friend of mine was working on OS/2 within IBM at
the time, until he left with serious stress and depression: the people
management was not good. 

Then MS switched emphasis, so that the Windows API was the primary
personality of OS/2 3.0, and renamed it Windows NT. That also had an OS/2
personality at the start, along with a POSIX personality. 

John