Jakki wrote:
Was there a Windows NT. operating system ? ever??
Yes it was the precursor to our present-day Windows operating system. At first it was marketed to "enterprise" users. Its precursor, in turn, was the VMS operating system.
In parallel, DOS-based versions of Windows were marketed to consumers. The last of these was Windows ME. Then Windows XP came out which was a direct successor to NT, and all later versions descend from that.
The development of NT was very stressful for those involved. The main reason was that Microsoft wanted existing Windows software to run seamlessly on NT, sort of a square peg in a round hole situation. I wonder if that was a good strategy. The problem was that commercial software was so expensive then, and the hardware wasn't powerful enough to adequately support VMs, which is how the situation would be dealt with today. This probably contributed to the bad press Microsoft tended to get in the 90s. A lot of people in the media felt strongly that nobody should compete with Apple in that market, despite that many Windows based systems were better than anything Apple had at the time, except possibly where media production was concerned (an area in which Microsoft never seriously tried to compete).
Ironically Apple took a similar path. The current Apple desktop OS descends from NextStep, an OS few of us ever used, and the OS of the old "Macs" of the 90s and before was retired a long time ago.
I used Next in the 90s. I wrote projects using Apple Yellow Box, which produced binaries which ran on Windows, MacOS and NextStep. The language was Objective-C. Nobody used it at the time, and I put it in a corner of my CV and forgot about it for years, until the first iPhones came out and suddenly my phone started ringing off the hook.