Re: Byte ordering

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