I didn't mean to imply there was something "less" about the talent creating the DOS-based Windows OS. I think it's a marvel of engineering for economy and constraints.

I think NT was a means to an end (government contracts requiring a "Rainbow book"-qualified OS). It was a long time before the DOS-based Windows OS lost its position as the consumer / business offering. I think that shows MSFT knew what they had in that legacy code and leveraged it for great profit for a long time.

I think the "adults" came in and made a stuffy buttoned-down operating system meant to qualify as a "C2"-compliant OS meant to win contracts. NT doesn't have the hacky charm of the DOS-based Windows versions.

Would HyperV and Virtualization Based Security be that take? I suppose it’s taken very far on Xbox and VBS is enabled by default on most Windows systems.

It was not a hypervisor, the hardware was not virtualized. They instead used 16-bit code for the OS kernel, simply transitioning between 16 and 32-bit modes.

The 16-bit code was a dead end. It was not re-enterable, so 32-bit code had to take a Win16Mutex on every kernel code.

If you ever debugged DirectX code on Win9x, you'd remember that quite vividly. The LockSurface call that provided direct access to pixels locked this mutex, so a breakpoint in a locked section caused an instant hard deadlock.

That being said, it indeed was a brilliant hack that allowed a featereful GUI to run within 2Mb of RAM with good DOS compatibility.

The "obviousness" about NT's design I was talking about, compared to the DOS-based Windows versions, were things like a trusted computing base, access control, kernel/user separation, memory protection, etc (stuff the DOS-based Windows versions had little to none of).

POSIX systems have that stuff, too.

Definitely. I think the way microsoft brought their user base along between 1990 and 2000 from Dos to 32-bit protected mode was beautifully respectful of their users. To me it's the standard for how to change a user's preferences (maybe for social change in general). I just used Dos or win16 apps less and less over the decade and eventually my use dropped to zero. At no time did I feel coerced to leave behind what I already invested in, I just came to appreciate the alternative they were offering (the opposite of a forced OTA update). By the 2000s I could already sense a slight change in tone with how strongly they were pushing those service packs for windows xp.

Windows games worked great on Windows 2000! There were officially inofficial packages of DirectX and such - I never had any trouble with them.

I think DOS games also worked.