You obviously don't know much about the Victorians.

I don't know where to begin with listing insane legislation from the EU. Perhaps banning fencing creosote. Maybe that's OK in dry sunny countries, but not where i live in the hills of Wales where it is much damper than in your "majority of countries" in the EU.

Why?

My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it. It is true that Dave Cutler and his team members were recruited by MS from DEC, and came with with the the source code of a DEC OS called Mica (an evolution from VMS but later cancelled), and this (and Cutler's experience in DEC) was used in creating NT. DEC later got an out of court settlement from MS over this stolen code. Reference. Nevertheless, some elements of OS/2 were also used, like the printing sub-system I believe.

Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.

I should know. In particular it crashed every time you printed something from WordPerfect for Windows, which we needed to do a lot (for memos - had no email then). Fortunately the print job did get through first. Maybe it was WordPerfect's fault, I don't know, don't care now. Windows 3.0 frequently crashed when WordPerfect was not running too.

I am talking about where I worked. We did not get Windows 3.0 the moment it came out. We did get 3.1 the moment it came out though, having found 3.0 so awful we hoped 3.1 was better, and it was. They should have called 3.0 the beta.

Even worse, they marketed the version of OS/2 (2.1 AFAIR) which had Windows 3.1 on board already in a virtual machine as "OS/2 for Windows"!

As if OS/2 was some kind of app. It was like the tail wagging the dog, with OS/2 being a grown-up OS and Win3.1 being a dog's breakfast.

It was, but you need to understand the culture back then. The processor arms race had not begun and people thought that 286s and 386s would be around for ever - 386s for power users and 286s for the rest of us. SLR cameras are an analogy - Nikon have both entry level and professional grade SLRs, always have, and no-one expects today's professional camera to become next year's entry level camera. The two lines develop separately.

That was when I was buying my first PC, and I was going to get a 286 as "it was all I needed", despite 386s being around. Then suddenly the arms race took off and I got a 486. I remember the dismay and even indignation of other guys who had just bought a 286 or 386 and were suddenly left behind.

My work Win3.0 machine crashed so often that it is a fine point as to whether the blame lay with Win3.0 or the app. True, there was often the message "UAE" [Unrecoverable Application Error] but I suspect that Windows would have said that anyway. If it was the apps, then Windows should not have allowed the app to bring the whole machine down.

Win3.1 was considerably better with the same apps, so it could be done.

The fact that you could get a DOS prompt does not mean it ran on DOS. I am running Mepis Linux right now, and can call up a DOS prompt in a virtual machine. I can also dual boot into DOS, which is effectively what Win9x could do if you needed it, especially for games then.

Windows NT came out in 1993, predated Win95, and had nothing to do with DOS apart from the capability to run DOS in a virtual machine. Its own command line interface was not DOS, even though many of the commands had the same syntax

Having an auto-starting app, even a GUI shell, is hardly a quantum leap in computer history, nor is auto-running CDs.

Exactly. I worked for a big corporate at the time and we all had PCDos on IBM ATs running stuff like IBM DisplayWrite and, most importantly, a mainframe terminal emulator because the (IBM) mainframe was where our serious stuff was. When Win 3.0 came out we were all handed boxed copies (I recently sold mine) - although Windows was MS, it seemed (to our management at least) the way to go, and was assumed to have IBM endorsement (a corporate essential) because it would run on IBM PCs. Management were unaware of the MS-IBM bust-up.

Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour. It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1. It was not networked of course, but we would share printers in groups of four of us using a switchbox.

At about same time, one guy in our branch, our IT "co-ordinator" (who knew nothing about IT) was given OS/2 as a pilot. We all understood that would be the way to go fo all of us, but the whole thing stagnated (I guess because of the IBM/MS split). OS/2's price (its own, and that of the memory needed to run it) remained too high. I bought OS/2 for home but there were bugs (could have be sorted by IBM if they had their heart in it) and lack of apps. It seemed there was an anti-OS/2 camp within IBM itself.

But people, like our middle-aged management, who had never previously used computers (I had started on a PDP 11) or seen a GUI before, thought Windows and MS were absolutely wonderful. Us younger guys all had home computers by then, and knew better. Ironically, the generation after us also thought Windows and MS were wonderful because they never saw anything but Windows. It led to all the myths that we must now endure about Gates being a genius, inventing the PC, making computing affordable, and such like crap.

But Windows 3 (if we include its 3.1 bug-fix) was a milestone in that it popularised the graphical interface.

You should have ignored them. Anyone has the right to distribute shareware. You do know how shareware works don't you? If so, I don't understand why you even contacted them and I expect they didn't either. Here is the first Google definition I've found :- "Shareware is software that is distributed free on a trial basis with the understanding that the user may need or want to pay for it later."

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding here. Shareware can be upgraded to fully paid versions by, well, paying. I guess that these companies were assuming, by your contacting them at all, that you wanted to pay for the upgrade to the full version. So it is hardly suprising if they were taken aback by such a request, and that they no longer had the full version of this ancient DOS stuff by their right elbow.

The result would be about the same. People are people. There is far more variation in culture between different organisations (including between different government offices) than there is any public/private divide in this. I've seen it all, including working in the UK Admiralty at one time where the security was fanatical.

As for TFA (I've followed the links) I find the 2/3 figure hard to believe and the article is light on facts and the form of the questions. Perhaps the 2/3 would not report in a case where they knew it was their own fault. I'm guessing, as I see no reason not to report any other breach that came to light. The resulting flap it would make an interesting diversion to the usual dull routine.